For any normal campaign, staff shakeups in the middle of a race are a red flag indicating that all is not right within the operation. Occasionally, mid-campaign churn is just normal turnover, indicative of nothing too serious. Most often, and particularly amid a spate of bad headlines, it is a sign of panic within a campaign’s ranks. The Trump camp’s internal staff shakeup falls decidedly in the latter category.
As I wrote yesterday, the Trump campaign is of two minds on how to conduct the candidate’s affairs, and they often come into conflict. A traditional presidential vehicle, for example, would probably have compelled its campaign manager to defuse an escalating feud with a journalist before it became a criminal matter. When that criminal matter escalated and that campaign manager was arrested on the charge of battery, a traditional campaign would have jettisoned the dead weight dragging them down and forcing their candidate off message. Not the Trump campaign. They and their candidate stood by embattled campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, even going so far as to insist that his accuser had inflicted harm on herself to frame the accused.
That’s the Mr. Hyde face of the Trump campaign with which so many are familiar and by which Trump’s core supporters are so enthralled. Behind the scenes, the Trump campaign’s Dr. Jekyll is not impervious to reality and the challenges ahead. Amid a deluge of press accounts regarding Senator Ted Cruz’s remarkably effective efforts to undermine the Trump campaign’s delegate operation, Team Trump finally started getting serious about Cleveland in late March. They hired Paul Manafort, a veteran GOP operative and associate of Trump ally Roger Stone with experience navigating the last contested GOP convention in living memory – the 1976 nominating contest.
Just five days ago, Trump gave an indication that he was personally aware of how his campaign’s behavior had diminished his electoral prospects when he expressed regret for some of his and his campaign’s behavior. What’s more, the candidate appeared to be attempting a correction by reducing Corey Lewandowski’s responsibilities and shrinking his public profile. Meanwhile, Manafort had begun to take the reins of the campaign from Lewandowski. Though the Trump campaign manager was still formally Manafort’s superior, Politico reported last week that the new sheriff in town had taken over the campaign’s Washington presence and was hiring staff loyal to him. For the famously territorial Lewandowski, there was bound to be a clash.
In the wake of Trump’s landslide loss to Ted Cruz in Wisconsin, the campaign is performing the kind of house cleaning you might expect from a traditional campaign amid hard times, with the difference being that this was expected to be a particularly tumultuous realignment. “Behind the scenes, Lewandowski is fighting to preserve his own power and to box out Paul Manafort,” read a dispatch from Politico’s Eli Stokols yesterday. For his part, Manafort apparently had no intention of being boxed out:
Manafort met with Trump in New York Wednesday morning to discuss strategy and to outline his concerns about a lack of cooperation, according to one source. “If Manafort walks, this thing comes apart,” they said. “And some of the people close to him are ready to walk.”
The outcome of this internal squabble was never really in doubt. On Thursday, the Trump campaign announced that Manafort had taken over all duties related to the Cleveland convention and assembling the requisite delegates to win the nomination outright. Though the Trump campaign’s release indicated that Manafort was still subordinate to Lewandowski and his staff, discerning reporters were not buying it.
“Manafort is basically campaign manager without the name,” observed TIME Magazine reporter Zeke Miller. To the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, the move looked to him like a “takeover” of “professional political types within Trumpworld.”
Manafort joins a variety of veteran GOP operatives taking the wheel of the Trump campaign from the ragtag band of misfits who initially staffed the celebrity candidate’s operation. Team Trump has even taken on a Washington-based lobbyist to head the campaign’s “D.C. outreach” initiatives. Even Trump’s decision not to jettison Lewandowski and invite the negative news cycle that would accompany a “staff shakeup” narrative indicates a maturation of the campaign that has previously been lacking – even if it sacrifices the candidate’s favorite catch phrase in the process.
Ah, but Mr. Hyde does so resent being muzzled. He is never far off, as the Trump campaign’s bizarre statement released on Tuesday night in which the campaign accused Ted Cruz of complicity in a vast criminal conspiracy exemplifies. The campaign cannot mature if its chief executive continues to set a reckless tone. No matter how well staffed his operation is, Donald Trump will always be its principal.
