Donald Trump shakes up campaign team
Donald Trump shakes up campaign team : Donald Trump, whose presidential bid has been stumbling badly in recent weeks, is reshuffling his campaign’s senior leadership.
The Republican nominee tapped pollster Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager and Breitbart News Chairman Stephen Bannon as campaign chief executive, Conway confirmed to POLITICO early Wednesday morning.
The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Trump told the paper “I want to win” and “That’s why I’m bringing on fantastic people who know how to win and love to win.”
Campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who had been effectively running the campaign for the past two months, will stay on in his current position.
But the shakeup seems to represent a diminution of his authority at a time when Trump’s campaign is sliding in polls versus Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, and has been badly damaged by a string of controversies stemming from Trump’s own impolitic pronouncements.
Manafort, a veteran of several GOP presidential campaigns, had been brought aboard in late March to professionalize a shoestring campaign operation run by relative neophytes and powered largely by Trump’s dominance of the news cycle through social media and mega-rallies.
Manafort emerged victorious from a power struggle with former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who was fired in June, but the Trump operation never came to resemble a traditional presidential campaign.
Manafort’s associates privately conceded in recent weeks that he’d grown frustrated with his futile effort to instill message discipline in the candidate. And this week, things got harder for Manafort with a series of damaging stories about his past work for pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians and oligarchs.
Conway, who has long served as a pollster for Trump’s running mate Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, has been working with the Trump campaign since July.
Conway described the campaign overhaul as an “expansion” of the existing team rather than a shakeup. She noted that Rick Gates, a close ally of Manafort, would be remaining in his role as a senior aide to the campaign.
“Rick is fabulous and he and Paul have built a solid operation,” she said in an email. The “expansion [is going] to accelerate our reach with just weeks to go.”
Bannon has been quietly advising people around the Trump campaign for months, sources around the campaign tell POLITICO.
While he has no apparent campaign experience, Bannon is nonetheless considered influential in conservative politics because of his ties to the Mercer family of mega-donors and his perch atop the conservative Breitbart News, which has been supportive of Trump’s campaign.
While he has no apparent campaign experience, Bannon is nonetheless considered influential in conservative politics because of his ties to the Mercer family of mega-donors and his perch atop the conservative Breitbart News, which has been supportive of Trump’s campaign.
Source:http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-campaign-manager-kellyanne-conway-227097
