“I think it’s fair to say that Donald Trump has shown us who he is”. Paul Manafort, Trump’s controversial campaign chairman, will retain his title, but it is unclear if his role will change.
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Stephen Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC, will become the Republican campaign’s chief executive, and Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser and pollster for Trump and his running mate, Governor Mike Pence of IN, will become the campaign manager.
Either way, the changes complicate what was already a hard task for congressional Republicans to defend their majorities in both chambers and hold together a splintering party. While Trump held a handful of meetings with Washington Republicans and fulfilled requests from GOP leaders to raise campaign cash, he’s continued to rankle lawmakers with his numerous controversies.
“What it portends it is an even more brutal fall campaign”, said David Axelrod, the chief strategist on Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns.
Clinton campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri responded with a statement early Wednesday accusing Trump of being the bigot instead.
But Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina called Trump’s move a good prescription for anxious congressional Republicans.
“I want to win”, Trump told the Wall Street Journal. He said even voters in California and IL – two areas less conservative than his own state – “know Washington, D.C.is broken”.
Glenn Beck, a conservative radio host and a backer of Trump’s rival Ted Cruz, recalled his earlier characterization of Bannon as a “horrible despicable human being” and said that the site’s founder “Andrew Breitbart is spinning in his grave right now”.
“This is sure not a plea for party unity”, joked Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, in Poughkeepsie, New York.
The Clinton aide said: ‘And what’s become clear from this is no matter how much the establishment wants to clean Donald Trump up, get him on a teleprompter and get him on message he has officially won the fight to “let Trump be Trump”.
“I am committed to doing whatever it takes to win this election, and ultimately become President because our country can not afford four more years of the failed Obama-Clinton policies which have endangered our financial and physical security”, Trump said in the announcement.
“It’s an expansion at a busy time in the final stretch of the campaign”, she said, adding that Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, would remain in their roles.
“That’s what he’s tapped in to”, said Price. A December piece Bannon co-wrote began: “Paul Ryan’s first major legislative achievement is a total and complete sell-out of the American people masquerading as an appropriations bill”.
But Price conceded that not all congressional Republicans have constituencies that necessarily see things that way, and these candidates know they must calibrate their local strategies accordingly.
“I can’t help wondering whether Trump may be thinking post-November of creating a media organization of some kind that caters to disgruntled white men of the kind who fueled his campaign”, said Kristof, “and Ailes and Bannon could be a part of that braintrust as well”. “I respect that and know Mr. Trump respects that as well”.
Clinton, a former secretary of state who has called Trump temperamentally unsuited for the White House, said staff shake-ups do nothing to change the candidate and his rhetoric.
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Trump has been badly damaged since denigrating the parents of a Muslim American soldier killed in Iraq, members of the so-called Gold Star families who have lost loved ones in military service.
