Things got so bad this week that Republican campaign operatives openly wondered whether Trump could be deliberately sabotaging his own campaign. The Washington Post cited campaign aides as saying that while Mr Trump respected Mr Manafort, he felt “boxed in” and “controlled” by people “who barely know him”. His new campaign manager is Kellyanne Conway, a veteran strategist and pollster who had been previously tasked with improving his dismal standing among women.
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Ousted Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, who recently stood down due to sexual harassment allegations from Fox News staff, is also apparently informally advising his friend Mr Trump in the lead up to the presidential debates.
Steve Bannon, conservative media executive at Breitbart News and former investment banker, is the new chief executive of the Trump campaign.
Despite her rapid ascent, Conway said the changes aren’t really a “shakeup”.
Her campaign’s manager accused Bannon of presiding over a website that “peddles divisive, at times racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories”.
He is “a bit of a street fighter, willing to go right at his opponents, and make sure that they know that in politics, all is fair”, Lewandowski told CNN.
Mr Bannon has not run a political campaign before, but he has made conservative documentaries, hosted a Breitbart-branded radio show and raised money for the website.
“She spent way over a hundred million dollars in negative ads on me and I’m fairly close, so I think we’re going to do very well, and we’re going to actually start doing ads over the next few days”, he said.
Wednesday’s is the second personnel shake-up at the top since June 20, when Mr Trump dropped his first manager, Corey Lewandowski, who was sidelined by Mr Manafort after he courted controversy by allegedly grabbing a Breitbart reporter.
The choice for American-Israeli Jews is quite clear, he argues, because Trump supports Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and supports moving the American embassy to “Israel’s capital”, Jerusalem.
Donald Trump restructured his campaign leadership Tuesday in a desperate attempt to turn around his flagging presidential bid.
The shakeup, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, doubles down on the grand Trump experiment: Can an outsider with no political experience swoop into a United States presidential race, break all the rules, and win the whole thing? “Can you use the Internet to win a general election?”
He has given three well-received policy speeches in the last two weeks – all carefully delivered with the aid of a teleprompter.
Manafort said in the campaign press release that the new staffers would “undoubtedly help take the campaign to new levels of success”.
She founded The Polling Company/WomanTrend in 1995, and was a pollster for President Ronald Reagan. He has angered Republicans as much as Democrats in Washington.
Keith Appell, a political consultant whom Bannon hired to promote a movie he’d made about Sarah Palin, describes Bannon as a hard-driving perfectionist with both strong organizational skills and a film-maker’s gift for storytelling.
His appointment is being read by some as a demotion for experienced campaign manager Paul Manafort, although the campaign denies that any demotion has taken place.
The Wall Street Journal said on Monday in an editorial that Trump should fix his stumbling White House campaign by Labor Day on September 5 or step down. Conway also has ties to the Mercers.
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Trump is now trailing Hillary Clinton, who has invested heavily in field, by 2.6 points in OH and 9.2 points in Pennsylvania, according to Real Clear Politics’ polling average. The news reports about Manafort’s relationship with Ukrainian officials could have been “the last straw”, but the biggest problem was Trump did not trust Manafort’s advice, the source said.
