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Republican Donald Trump shaking up campaign

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Republican Donald Trump is overhauling his campaign again, bringing in Breitbart News’ Stephen Bannon as campaign CEO and promoting pollster Kellyanne Conway to campaign manager.

TETERBORO, N.J. >> Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has slipped in the polls in recent weeks, has shaken up his campaign again.

The billionaire real estate mogul is bringing in Stephen Bannon of Breitbart News as chief executive officer and promoting pollster Kellyanne Conway to campaign manager.

“I’ve known both of them for a long time. They’re terrific people, they’re winners, they’re champs, and we need to win it,” Trump told The Associated Press in a phone interview early Wednesday.

The move comes just 82 days before the November election and represents yet another overhaul of Trump’s tumultuous quest for the White House.

In confirming the campaign overhaul, Trump called Bannon and Conway “big people” who can help him defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton in November.

Campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who formally took over the reins following the departure of Corey Lewandowski in June, will maintain his current title, Trump said.

Manafort deputy Rick Gates, who has been traveling often with Trump, is expected to maintain a senior role with the campaign.

The news, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, comes as opinion surveys show Trump trailing Clinton nationally and in a host of key battleground states.

Trump long has resisted pleas from fellow Republicans to overhaul the flame-throwing approach on the campaign trail that powered his surge to the top of the GOP field in the primary season. Instead of working to broaden his appeal, Trump has largely hewed to the large rallies and attention-grabbing comments that appealed to the Republican Party base.

“You know, I am who I am,” he told a local Wisconsin television station Tuesday. “It’s me. I don’t want to change. Everyone talks about, ‘Oh, well you’re going to pivot, you’re going to.’ I don’t want to pivot. I mean, you have to be you. If you start pivoting, you’re not being honest with people.”

Conway called the moves “an expansion at a critical time in the homestretch.”

Details of the new pecking order were hashed out at a lengthy senior staff meeting at Trump Tower Tuesday while Trump was on the road. Additional senior hires are expected in the next few days.

Trump, whose campaign is built on his persona as a winner, said several time that the campaign is “doing well,” and said his speech hours earlier in Wisconsin Tuesday was well-received.

“We’re going to be doing something very dramatic,” Trump added.

Trump’s campaign announced earlier that it would finally begin airing its first ads of the general election next week in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

While polls have shown Clinton building a lead following the Philadelphia convention, Democrats are fearful that a depressed voter turnout might diminish support among the minority, young and female voters who powered Obama to two victories.

Clinton said at a voter registration event at a Philadelphia high school that she’s “not taking anybody anywhere for granted” in the race for the White House, saying the stakes “could not be higher.”

In the Wisconsin outing Tuesday, Trump accused Clinton of “bigotry” and being “against the police,” claiming that she and other Democrats have “betrayed the African American community” and pandered for votes.

“We reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton, which panders to and talks down to communities of color and sees them only as votes — that’s all they care about,” the GOP nominee said in remarks delivered not far from Milwaukee — the latest city to be rocked by violence in the wake of a police shooting.

Trump has been lagging in the polls since he was crowned the GOP standard-bearer in Cleveland last month. He charged that Clinton has been on the side of the rioters in Milwaukee, declaring: “Our opponent Hillary would rather protect the offender than the victim.”

“The riots and destruction that have taken place in Milwaukee is an assault on the right of all citizens to live in security and to live in peace,” he said.

Clinton campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri responded with a statement early Wednesday accusing Trump of being the bigot instead.

“With each passing Trump attack, it becomes clearer that his strategy is just to say about Hillary Clinton what’s true of himself. When people started saying he was temperamentally unfit, he called Hillary the same. When his ties to the Kremlin came under scrutiny, he absurdly claimed that Hillary was the one who was too close to Putin. Now he’s accusing her of bigoted remarks — We think the American people will know which candidate is guilty of the charge,” she said.

——

Pace reported from Washington.

——

Jill Colvin and Julie Pace on Twitter at http://twitter.com/colvinj and https://twitter.com/jpaceDC

80 responses to “Republican Donald Trump shaking up campaign”

  1. lunalilohi says:

    Lying Trump. Where are his tax returns and what is he hiding.

    MARK MAKELA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
    Trump Casinos’ Tax Debt Was $30 Million. Then Christie Took Office.
    Under Gov. Chris Christie, New Jersey agreed to accept just $5 million in the bankruptcy cases of casinos founded by his friend Mr. Trump, raising questions of special treatment.

    • OldDiver says:

      Breitbart News is the sleaziest fake news organization on the planet. Expect the smears against Hillary Clinton to go into overdrive.

    • Boots says:

      Hay, if your income is far less than what is implied and that you are heavily in debt to Russia, perhaps you wouldn’t want to release your tax returns too? The poor Donald. He got in well above his head and now it is crashing down upon the republican party.

      • Cricket_Amos says:

        “you are heavily in debt to Russia”

        Would you happen to have a reference for this? Thanks.

        • MillionMonkeys says:

          Trump is an egomaniac self promoter who habitually says untruths (he lies). I would expect that if he claims to be worth $10 billion, the truth is more like one or two billion, maybe less than a billion.

          If he actually had $10 billion, don’t you think he’d fudge the details and say he was worth $20 to $50 billion?. I can’t imagine he’d tell the the boring truth.

      • lespark says:

        Obama got us into 20 trillion dollars of debt. Trump is small potatoes compared to Obama. And Crooked Clinton is raking in the dough for play.

        • advertiser1 says:

          This article has nothing to do with Obama, why can’t you stay on point and defend your candidate?

  2. MillionMonkeys says:

    What’s a kind way of saying the Trump camp is desperate…?

    • kuroiwaj says:

      MM, the Trump camp has just strengthen its campaign to win in November. Being smart and bringing on board winners is never desperation. Ms Clinton is dragging a house and now that house will be exposed by the new team and the honest Mr. Trump.

  3. RetiredUSMC says:

    More Right Wing Zealots to help draft speeches of hate!

  4. klastri says:

    Mr. Trump is also discovering that saying racist and bigoted things is bad for business. It was reported this morning that foot traffic to his hotels and golf courses has dropped significantly during his campaign. People who follow Mr. Trump cannot afford what he sells. The people who can afford what he sells don’t like him.

    Anyone who has seen how he’s run his campaign (that’s if you can actually call it a campaign) can see what type of manager he his. He’s very lucky that his father had so much money. Very.

    • thos says:

      One must perforce go easy on klastri out of a sense of compassion and decency, because it is not appropriate to pick on a cognitively challenged intellectual d w a r f who has clearly been allowed to marinate too long in the pool of “ain’t I sump’m”.

      You see klastri, like so many of his colleagues, graduated magna cum grandiose from some typical law school where he and his fellow students were told that they are the elite and therefore know far more about what is best for their countrymen than do the countrymen themselves – – and that they can and should bend the law as they see fit to achieve the noble goals in how things SHOULD be. It should come as no surprise that a great many of them have washed into that vast flow of noxious effluent known as the Democrat Party.

      We ordinary slobs in flyover country were given a fascinating (if unintended, certainly unauthorized) peek into the way our over lawyered government ACTUALLY works when then SCOTUS nominee Sotomayor was overheard telling her adoring brood of law school chicks “Policy is MADE at the appellate court level.” And silly us, we (most of us) thought that laws were to be made by the Legislative branch, not the Judicial” according to Article I of the Constitution.

      Given that the current occupant of the White House once taught Constitutional law at law school it seems safe to conclude that these elite legal beagles among us consider the Constitution a nuisance to be ignored whenever possible.

      This cadre of self proclaimed gurus – – and the infamous Marbury v. Madison decision of 1803 that knocked the stuffing out of checks and balances – – go a long way to explain the dog’s breakfast we have made of our 240 year experiment in self-governance. Ultimately this whole mess IS our fault for neglecting our duties to see to it that our public servants do not morph into becoming our masters.

      The good news is that we still have the POWER to bring this rogue government to heel and make it obey OUR will, as the framers intended.

  5. bsdetection says:

    Trump is dialing the crazy up to 11. Wonder if Manafort (a Putin lapdog) will still get to go to the classified briefing today. Could he have been barred from the security briefing; the timing of his demotion is suspicious. But Putin shouldn’t worry; he still has numerous allies in the Trump camp. How long will the Breitbart era last? Are we weeks or days away from another “overhaul” which will put Alex Jones in charge?

  6. whs1966 says:

    Trump frequently “shakes up” is campaign staff because he doesn’t understand that he–not his minions–is the problem.

    • thos says:

      With every staff shake up, Candidate Trump progresses further and further in meeting the steep learning curve challenges he has set for himself.

      That is why Democrat Party bigshots and “news” media hotshots (one and the same actually) are soiling their skivvies just now, why the tenor of their remarks has gone from shallow to shrill to shriek.

      If they really thought Don Trump was a light weight nobody they could afford to dismiss, they would not now be locked in the jaws of their all too evident hysteria.

      For them Trump is like a constantly changing kaleidoscope and they do not know how to conduct a set piece battle of personal destruction to put him down as they did, say, against Sarah Palin. They are static thinkers; Trump is dynamic. What they see as fatal risk to his campaign, he sees as opportunity~~and it is driving them bonkers.

      • Ikefromeli says:

        When you say steep learning curve, is that a linguistically challenged metaphor for the most lopsided loss in modern electorate history?

        • thos says:

          It is beginning to appear that Yale denied you the education you need to function effectively in the real world.

        • Ikefromeli says:

          Last I looked, a brownstone in Mnahattan and a house in Hawai’i, three kids all at elite colleges and past jobs that include the US Senate, the US State Department, a faculty position at an Ivy, a law firm that is one of the largest in the US, Boston Consulting……yeah, I have real problems effectively functioning in society.

        • klastri says:

          Ikefromeli – I get the same thing. I’m a “failed lawyer” with a oceanfront house on a bluff in Maui and an apartment in London; two great kids through professional degrees; and seat on two boards of directors. Sounds like failure to me!

        • Ikefromeli says:

          For some, the pursuit of the lower margin, and the subsequent exercise of how life or the system failed them resonates much more than actual achievement–to each his own.

        • sarge22 says:

          Trump: DOJ ‘has to be ashamed’ over Clinton emails
          By NICK GASS 08/17/16 06:31 AM EDT
          Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
          The Department of Justice “has to be ashamed” with the way it handled its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server to handle classified information as secretary of state, Donald Trump said in a new interview aired Wednesday discussing his concerns about his opponent receiving classified briefings.
          Asked specifically about public concerns regarding both him and Clinton receiving classified briefings, Trump remarked to Fox News’ Ainsley Earhardt on Tuesday night in Milwaukee that he is “worried about [Clinton] getting it because of her email situation. She can’t keep anything private.”
          Story Continued Below

          “I think her email scandal is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. She deleted 33,000 emails which is a crime, what she did is a crime, and to think that you have subpoenas and you’re deleting emails, it’s unthinkable. And I think probably her single greatest achievement in her life will be getting out of that mess because — and I don’t think she’s really out of it. I can’t believe that she’s out of it, but Justice has to be ashamed. Justice has to be ashamed,” Trump said. “When you look at — when you look at the fact that she did so many things wrong. When you just look at the volume of — you know, I call her crooked Hillary — you look at the volume of things she did wrong, and for her to get away with that is, to me, I think it’s very hard to believe.”
          Trump himself will receive his first classified briefing at FBI headquarters later Wednesday.

          Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/trump-justice-department-clinton-emails-227098#ixzz4HdagilL0
          Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook

    • MillionMonkeys says:

      This is exactly what happens when a successful salesman/marketing wiz tries to run the company. It ends in head-shaking failure. They are two completely different jobs requiring completely different mind-sets.

      Trump fans, do you understand that? Time to find a new dictator idol who actually knows how to RUN a company.

  7. Ikefromeli says:

    The clown parade continues. The ridiculous miscues and ideology will be now offering seconds and thirds…..

  8. Ikefromeli says:

    In a fairly representative analysis, Politico’s Michael Hirsh explained the “new nationalism” as “a bitter populist rejection of the status quo that global elites have imposed on the international system since the Cold War ended, and which lower-income voters have decided — understandably — is unfair.”

    James P. Pinkerton, writing for the stridently pro-Trump website Breitbart News, sees nothing less than a “Worldwide Trumpian Majority” forming to oppose globalization in all its forms. Interestingly, commentators across the ideological spectrum also agree that these trends are fueled by economic conditions — manifested here as outrage at Wall Street and global trade deals — and can be solved by some government response.

    Both Trump and Hillary Clinton offer similar solutions, such as more trade barriers and massive infrastructure spending. That interpretation is fine as far as it goes, but I don’t think it goes very far.

    Ultimately, the term “nationalism” distorts more than it clarifies about what’s going on with Trump supporters in the United States. First, suggestions that a Trumpian nationalism is rising among all low-income Americans could only be true if all low-income Americans were white. Reading Breitbart’s celebrations of populist nationalism or the constant invocations of “We the People” from Trump supporters on social media might leave you with that impression. This is not to say that everyone who supports Trump is a “white nationalist” — which conjures various racist doctrines. Rather, it is to simply point out that Trump’s support is overwhelmingly, almost exclusively, white.

    And therein lies WHY he in the unavoidable rabbit hole of taking a historical whopping in Novermber. As always, I rarely post anything from D leaning publication—this is from the entirely right slanted National Review.

    Cricket crew–hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!

    Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439048/trumps-nationalism-white-identity-politics-brand-name

  9. Dawg says:

    The TRUMPER’s campaign is in cardiac arrest, with no pulse or heart. Last thump, then stick a fork in it!

  10. lespark says:

    The Mynah birds are up early.
    Great speech in West Bend. Mr. Trump laid out his plans for the future. Crooked Hilliary is correct. The stakes were never higher. It’s either the Jail House or the White House for her and her cronies.

    Reagan told the Russians tear down this wall. Mr. Trump is saying tear down the Corruption that has become synonymous with The Clintons, The Clintons Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiatives. From dead broke to multi-millionaires since she became Secretary of State.

    Mr. Trump has made 3 well received major Policy Speeches, Hilliary is more concerned with bashing Mr. Trump. She has no plans to undo the dire economy except more of the same. People realize that Crooked Hilliary will say anything and change nothing. (Obama 2008).

    • klastri says:

      It’s over for Trump. He’s finished.

      His loss is careening into the type of landslide that will take the Senate and House down with him. Good riddance.

      • thos says:

        Have you noticed? Trump is forcing you to repeat yourself over and over, day after day. How sad for you.

      • d_bullfighter says:

        Why should anyone believe your prognostication ability klastri? After all did you not predict dire consequences for the American stock market as a result of the June 24 Brexit vote? Since then, the DJIA has set an all-time closing high.

        • klastri says:

          You don’t understand – obviously – what I was writing about regarding the worldwide capital loss resulting from that vote. It’s too heavy a lift to educate you. You’ve made it clear that you are proud of your ignorance.

    • Boots says:

      I listened to most of his speech last night on law and order. My wife wanted to change the channel as the Donald is just hot air. I wanted to see if he would be at all specific on anything. Sadly he wasn’t. Just verbal diarrhea that went on and on. No specifics. I guess he is just going to waive his magic wand and make all the problems go away. Typical republican though. Be afraid, be very afraid as they are coming for you. But the Donald will protect you. All I can say is with the Donald better hold onto your wallets. Cop on every corner is going to be expensive. lol

    • HawaiiCheeseBall says:

      Well received by whom? Chumps policy speeches are nothing but the same tired rhetoric. You miss the point les tha the problem with Chump is that he can’t get out of his own way. All we hear about is the garbage coming out of his campaign not what the candidate actually says. He is in the middle of squandering time, another week of campaigning is lost because the news cycles are dominated by the chaos within the Chump campaign, and a sweetheart tax deal he got from his boy toy Chris Christie., not the candidate himself. Hillary is just going about her business, the polling is showing that as Chump sinks.

  11. MoiLee says:

    Man! Did you see Donald’s Speech? “Making America Safer Again” Awesome!And guess what? psssssst,pssssst……His number are Rising again! This is what The Donald has to keep doing,focus & stay on point! And a point well taken? Donald stated “This Lady has been in Politics for over 30 years”! And what does she have to show for it? Not Good. Another of my faves was reigning in the Dishonest MSM.
    Yeah “Let’s Make Them Honest Again”. Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

    I’m still trying to come to grips with The Donald using the Telepromter.But heck! It seems to be working.I kinda like the straight forward. Take No Bull, “I gotta be me” Donald Trump!

    Good move bringing in Kellyanne Conway into the circle. This will indeed help Donald.A lot! The same goes for Katrina Pierson. What an amazing and whitty lady And Nikki Haley? OMG! Not only ,Sharp and Smart but all Beautiful professional women. Go Donald.Outstanding!

    • klastri says:

      Sure. Who better to bring into the organization than Ms. Pierson, an admitted shoplifter and liar? What better spokesman could he find?

      So you like the fact that Mr. Trump can read words written by other people? That is certainly a high bar you have there!

      • DPK says:

        Doesn’t Hillary read speeches produced by others?

        • klastri says:

          She might. But she speaks in complete sentences, no matter the technology available. Mr. Trump is unable to complete a single cohesive thought from start to finish if it’s not written down for him.

        • sarge22 says:

          Million Dollar Bounty Offered For Hillary’s “True” Health Records
          by Tyler Durden Aug 17, 2016 3:53 PM

          As questions abound over Hillary’s “mental and physical stamina,” the Clinton campaign has come out swinging blasting any concerns over the presidential candidate’s strange behaviors as “deranged conspiracy theories” adding that Trump was “simply parroting lies.” But, if the Clinton campaign thought they could brush this off with their media pals’ help, think again as TruePundit is offering an unprecedented reward of $1 Million (One Million Dollars US) for Clinton’s true medical records.

          Read more….

          http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-17/million-dollar-bounty-offered-hillarys-true-health-records

    • keaukaha says:

      Are you watching the Disney channel polls? In reality his campaign is in a downward spiral and was doomed from the start.

  12. Tempmanoa says:

    Breitbart is like Fox News on steroids. They were responsible for some dirty tricks in the Republican primary. They are sleazy but quiet. Trump dkes not need more sleaze– just stay on point like the party wants him to so Trump does not pull down the GOP Senate races like he is now. The polls cannot deal with Trump and they have been wildly off. Modern big data that pulls information from your cell phone and allows tapping into voter sentiment and recording where you are down to your street address and your campaign donations combined with your tweets and information on whether you have gone to the polls are replacing old fashioned polls that call you so you just hang up. These scientific tech polls have told the true story of Trump and Sanders. They show a true picture taken from your devices and Trump is either tied or ahead of Clintom– but more important– he is trending upward.

  13. ready2go says:

    Trump’s campaign is a mess.

  14. Ikefromeli says:

    The Seante is set to go down….aloha no Rs.

    Since the conventions, however, Trump’s polling has worsened — overall and in states with key Senate races. In the eight states with competitive Senate races and both pre- and post-conventions polling,2 Trump had previously been down an average of about 6 percentage points; he’s now down an average of 9 points.3 And while Republican Senate candidates had been up by an average of a little more than 1 percentage point before the conventions in these eight states, they are now down by a little more than 1 point. That is, Republican Senate candidates in key states are still running ahead of Trump, but that cushion may no longer be enough to win now that Trump’s fortunes have worsened.

    AUG. 3 MARGIN AUG. 15 MARGIN CHANGE
    STATE TRUMP GOP SENATE CANDIDATE TRUMP GOP SENATE CANDIDATE TRUMP GOP SENATE CANDIDATE
    N.H. -2 +2 -11 -5 -9 -7
    Illinois -18 -1 -20 -7 -2 -6
    Pennsylvania -6 +2 -10 -2 -4 -4
    N.C. -1 +4 -5 +1 -4 -3
    Wisconsin -9 -8 -12 -11 -3 -3
    Nevada -3 +3 -4 +2 -1 -1
    Florida -4 +5 -5 +5 -1 0
    Ohio -4 +4 -6 +6 -2 +2
    Average -3.3 -2.8
    Trump may be dragging down Republican Senate candidates
    Note: The Aug. 15 numbers are as of 7 p.m.

    Six of the eight Republican candidates for Senate are polling worse than they were before the conventions. Nothing has changed in Florida, according to the polls. And Sen. Rob Portman in Ohio is the only Republican whose fortunes have improved. (That may be partially because he has a massive fundraising edge over his Democratic opponent, Ted Strickland.) The biggest shifts have been in Illinois, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, and in the latter two, the leader flipped.

    Among the eight states, the most precipitous drop for both Trump and the GOP Senate candidate happened in New Hampshire, where Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte had led in most polls before the conventions. Since then, she has trailed in all four polls of the state that have been released. MassINC pollster Steve Koczela, who conducted one of the surveys in the New Hampshire average, had told me that Ayotte’s troubles are at least partially because of “how closely tied the Ayotte and Trump vote are” and that he saw that “as evidence that Trump is hurting her.”

    Republicans have also seen their prospects worsen in Pennsylvania. Trump is now down 10 percentage points in the state, a headwind that may be too much for Republican Sen. Pat Toomey to overcome. Toomey, like Ayotte, had been leading in most polls before the conventions. But he has trailed in four of the five polls conducted since the conventions. Toomey’s slide, in particular, should worry Republicans. He has made it clear that he is not a Trump fan and has avoided appearing with Trump when he visits the Keystone State. And yet, their fates still seem tied. It may be that down-ballot Republicans can only do so much to keep themselves from getting swept up in an anti-Trump tide.

    Democrats now lead in enough states to take back the Senate — so long as Clinton holds on to her large lead. If the favorites in the polls win, the Democrats would flip and pick up the seats in Illinois, Indiana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Republicans would pick up Nevada and hold onto Florida, North Carolina and Ohio. Of course, many of these races are close, and there’s plenty of time before Election Day. The fight for the Senate isn’t over by a long shot. Republicans and Trump — or Republicans without Trump — could rebound.

  15. Ikefromeli says:

    Day by day, news bulletin by news bulletin, the Trump campaign spirals to new depths of strategic confusion and moral chaos. On the escalators at Trump Tower, the direction is always down, down, down.

    At the center of the campaign is Trump himself, and, summoning the spirit of Sinatra’s most irritating song, he has made it clear that he will win or lose by doing it his way, by refusing to “pivot” or blandify his message and language. There is a kind of cracked integrity in this. No matter what the polls and cable gasbags say, he is going to be himself. “I am who I am. It’s me. I don’t want to change,” he told a local-television interviewer, in Wisconsin. “I mean, you have to be you. If you start pivoting, you’re not being honest with people.”

    The people closest to Trump are his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner. Like the children of populist reactionaries the world over, they spent last week vacationing aboard David Geffen’s two-hundred-million-dollar collapsible dinghy, the Rising Sun, along with Rupert Murdoch’s former wife Wendi Deng. They Jet Skied and toured the old town of Dubrovnik. It is clear—both from legal documents and from Lizzie Widdicombe’s reporting—that Ivanka Trump and Kushner have occasionally been alarmed by the candidate’s public statements (particularly on Mexican “rapists”), but they are, despite their gestures toward feminism and social liberalism, completely committed to Trump and Trumpism. As their friend Reed Cordish put it, “They’re believers. They are all in. They have been all in from the get-go, without hesitation.”

    With the polls suggesting a potential electoral wipeout in November, Kushner returned from Croatia and took part in meetings this past weekend that kicked Paul Manafort, the campaign manager, either upstairs or to the side of the road, depending on your reading of the spin. This announcement came shortly after the Associated Press broke the story that Manafort “helped a pro-Russian governing party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012, and did so in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party’s efforts to influence U.S. policy.” Under federal law, it is a felony if American lobbyists fail to report their ties to foreign political parties or leaders.

    This story was just a new piece in a bewildering puzzle concerning the Trump campaign’s ties to, and the candidate’s own views on, the Putin regime. In an interview I conducted yesterday for “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” Jake Sullivan, Hillary Clinton’s closest adviser on foreign policy and national security, made it clear that the Russian issue would remain a focus of the Clinton campaign. Sullivan pointed to Trump’s statements excusing Putin’s anti-democratic behavior, his questioning of nato’s commitments in Europe, and his proposal that he might lift sanctions on Russia. “Those are just some of the examples of where the Trump campaign and Trump himself have gone out and basically adopted not just the position but the logic and the rhetoric of Vladimir Putin,” he said.

    With Manafort’s demotion, the Trump campaign will now be led by Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, and Kellyanne Conway, a pollster and frequent Trump surrogate on CNN. It does not require a liberal spirit to define the nature of Breitbart. William Kristol, a leading neo-conservative political operative and editor, calls the Breitbart operation “Right-Wing, Intolerant, Mean-Spirited News.” (Kristol ought to know. Breitbart rewarded his opposition to Trump by running a story about him headlined “Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew.”) Bannon, who is every bit as pugnacious as the now-sidelined Corey Lewandowski, will hardly attempt to tame Trump or normalize him. He will be part of the effort to let Trump be Trump.

    As if that were not enough to promise an even uglier autumn, we’ve now learned that Roger Ailes, late of Fox News, is advising Trump before the opening Presidential debate, scheduled for September 26th at Hofstra University, on Long Island. That relationship is long-standing and close. Trump advised Ailes on how to “handle” myriad accusations of sexual harassment when he was running Fox News; despite this counsel, Ailes was sent from the building (though he was clutching a forty-million-dollar severance). Ailes is a deeply experienced political operative, having advised Ronald Reagan on how to handle the “age issue” before a critical debate with Walter Mondale, and George H. W. Bush on how to employ the shiv of racial fear to defeat Michael Dukakis. Ailes and Trump have not always had a smooth relationship—they quarrelled publicly after Trump’s clash with Megyn Kelly during a debate last year—but they are in sync in their xenophobic ideology and their disregard for the rights of women.

    No matter how aggressive or skilled the new members of the Trump campaign team may be, their task, their set of problems, appears vast. If Trump is left to his own devices, if he does not get a decisive boost from another cache of e-mails pried loose by Russian hackers, if reporters fail to discover a level of sleaze at the Clintons’ foundation that is truly ruinous and dispositive, their route to winning the Electoral College will be trying at best.

    The problem isn’t just that Trump doesn’t want to imitate a candidate with a semblance of rational bearing; it’s that he’s not believable when he does. His hallucinatory improvisations, his fact-lite flights of insult, conspiracy theory, and rage are him, the essence of Trump. His supporters sense that, and they credit it as a form of integrity and genuineness. When Trump is compelled to revert to a prepared text and the teleprompter, his discomfort is as evident as the fear of any hostage forced to read a statement of guilt into a video camera. Trump knows that his listeners know that this performance is not him at all, that he is making a gesture to campaign strictures for which he has nothing but impatience and contempt. In the end, not even those who admire and support Donald Trump most fervently will likely save Donald Trump from Donald Trump.NYer

    • Cricket_Amos says:

      When you copied the from Remick’s New Yorker piece, I think you should have referenced where it came from.

      You copied it word for word, but deleted the following paragraph on Hillary’s emails.

      “Sullivan added that the release of Clinton’s e-mails, almost certainly engineered by Russian intelligence, might only be a first step. “Given Russia’s track record and Putin’s track record, it would be folly to assume that there isn’t more that they would try to do to disrupt the election, more e-mails that they would put out,” Sullivan said. “We have to proceed on the assumption that that is going to happen.”

      An interesting deletion. Accidental? Deliberate?

      • Ikefromeli says:

        It’s clearly referenced at the very end “NYer”.

        • sarge22 says:

          Bill Clinton also repeated the Democratic excuse that she used a personal email account just like her predecessor, and that she turned over more email records than her predecessors did. This comparison is a pathetic and misleading attempt to normalize Hillary Clinton’s use of her personal email account and play down the fact that she was the only secretary of state to use a private server. The decision to use a private server is the root of all of the political difficulties concerning her email practices.

          Three Pinocchios TWP

        • Ikefromeli says:

          You might want to also ask Condi Rice and Colin Powell about their own private servers…

        • sarge22 says:

          I don’t see them on the ballot. Stay on point.

  16. Ikefromeli says:

    And for all the Barry haters……deal with it…one of the most popular Presidents in the modern era:

    JOB APPROVAL RATING
    YEAR PRESIDENT 1 MONTH BEFORE ELECTION FINAL
    2000 Bill Clinton 57% 66%
    1960 Dwight Eisenhower 58 60
    2016 Barack Obama 53* —
    1988 Ronald Reagan 51 63
    1976 Gerald Ford 50 53
    1968 Lyndon Johnson 43 49
    1992 George H.W. Bush 34 49
    1980 Jimmy Carter 34 34
    1952 Harry Truman 32 32
    2008 George W. Bush 25 29

    Job approval ratings for presidents since World War II
    Note: Job approval ratings for past presidents are taken from the last poll in October, the last month in their final year before they became lame-duck presidents, and the last poll of that year.
    John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who didn’t finish full terms in office, are excluded.
    * Obama’s approval rating is from the end of July.

    • HawaiiCheeseBall says:

      Sounds right. That is why Obama is on the stump for Hillary. A popular president is a great asset to the candidate. Very few Chumpsters realize how popular Obama is. They think he is a negative, one guy said that Obama is no Reagan which is correct, he may be more popular than Reagan.

  17. wrightj says:

    I would be having the “shakes” by now, too.

  18. Ikefromeli says:

    Why no Trump tax returns?? The following provides a nice probable overview:

    Speculation is that Donald Trump won’t disclose his tax returns because 1) he’s not charitable; 2) he doesn’t pay his fair share of taxes; or 3) he’s not as rich as he claims. Maybe, but a fourth reason seems most likely to me: Mr. Trump paid no federal taxes in 2015 because his losses exceeded his taxable income.

    If that’s the case, the resulting political ads from the Democrats would be devastating to Mr. Trump’s image among his supporters and, more important from Mr. Trump’s perspective, personally intolerable, given his fragile self-image.NYT opinions.

  19. Ikefromeli says:

    Let Trump be Trump, huh? So, petulant, imperialistic, unmodulated, undisciplined, lazy, petty, precocious, temperamental, unhinged, unread, unprepared, volatile and straight cray-cray.

    • HawaiiCheeseBall says:

      Hey look, at least when Chump acts like Chump he is at least being his genuine self. Yeah he says some outrageous things but at least the voters can see who he is.

  20. Honeybadger says:

    The shameful element of the whole election mess is that the USA has become a laughing stock in the eyes of the rest of the world. At home, we have two choices–a woman who may lie her way through her presidency or a flake who will run his presidency like a sleazy reality show. The Green Party is beginning to look very good at this juncture!!

    • hawaiikone says:

      Ms. Stein indeed seems like a sincere, dedicated individual. Johnson however has considerably more experience, as does his running mate. Also, their platform seems more palatable than the Green’s, even though both aren’t ideal in many respects. If Jill and her followers were to pledge their support to Gary, things would get even more interesting. Not likely, of course, but these are strange times..

  21. CEI says:

    Hats off to his Trumpness for appointing a woman to such a high profile position. Feminists and progressives everywhere should be cheering Mr. Trump for his commitment to social justice. Oops, almost forgot, feminism has nothing to do with women’s rights and everything to do with pushing a far left agenda. Which is why female conservatives and minority conservatives are quickly discredited by democrats and their media and popular culture lapdogs.

  22. 64hoo says:

    when the AP came out about this about Manafort getting 12 million from the urakrane what they did not tell you is that tom podesta who’s brother john is hillarys campaign manager, is that both brothers were also doing the same thing that manafort was doing. look it up. just look for Podesta group inc. mercuryLLc. and you will see that hillarys campaign manager is doing the same thing that manafort was doing, so what if my spelling is wrong but you get the point the AP tells half truths and lies. they should have brought that up.

  23. lespark says:

    Another disgrace to be added to the democrats rapidly growing list………………….
    So, the Dems had to pay actors to fill up seats at their convention and
    now we learn they paid Khan??
    Khan was paid $25,000 by the Clinton campaign to speak at the DNC.
    The speech was not written by Mr. Khan, but by two campaign staffers.
    The copy of the US Constitution that Mr. Khan held up was bought only
    two HOURS before his speech by a female staffer, to be used solely as a
    prop and Khan returned the book after speaking.
    5 Gold Star families turned down the opportunity to speak before Khan
    was contacted by the Clinton campaign.
    All five families were paid $5,000 and signed a non disclosure.
    Khan’s immigration law firm is in debt $1.7M and owes back taxes of
    upward $850,000 plus penalties.
    CNN paid Khan over $100,000 to tell his “story” and repeated
    interviews across networks.
    Khan was given a bonus of $175k by the DNC for his effort in the
    media.
    The IRS has since put Khan’s tax file on a “hold” status.
    Is this guy going to claim this on his taxes?? And doesn’t this
    disgrace the memory of his son?? Talk about soulless

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    • 64hoo says:

      here’s some more ABC news executive producer Ian Cameron is married to Susan Rice, National security advisor. CBS president David Rhodes is brother of Ben Rhodes Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. ABC news correspondent Claire Shipman is married to former white house secretary Jay Carney. ABC news and Univision reporter Mathew Jaffe is married to Katie Hogan Obama’s deputy press secretary. ABC president Ben Sherwood is brother of Obama’s special adviser Elizabeth Sherwood. and finally CNN president Virginia Moseley is married to former Hillary Clinton’s deputy secretary Tom Nides and now you now why they are in Obama’s pocket. isn’t it interesting when you look in Obama’s administration people fill positions of who they know not what they know or how competent they are—- and you wonder why our country has so many problems. now you know why the T.V. media backs Hillary Clinton and tells the people lies and half truth’s.

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