Trump shakes up campaign team
Trump critics scoff at campaign shuffle
Republicans and Democrats alike dismiss the idea that Trump will change — 'Trump is Trump.'
By Nick Gass, Politico
Donald Trump’s critics on both sides of the aisle scoffed at the shakeup of his top aides, arguing the Manhattan businessman needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror to figure out the root cause of his woes.
For weeks, Trump has been hit with tanking poll numbers, distracted by political opponents not named Hillary Clinton and staring down the distinct possibility that his last 14 months could all have been for naught. With Stephen Bannon, the brash and bare-knuckled executive of Breitbart News, coming on as Trump's campaign CEO and chief pollster Kellyanne Conway boosted to the role of campaign manager, the Manhattan businessman vowed to "do whatever it takes to win this election."
The announcement came hours after a well-received policy speech in Wisconsin in which he trained his "law and order" message onto the ongoing unrest in the Milwaukee area following another police-involved shooting, while accusing Clinton and the Democratic Party of "bigotry" toward African-Americans. And, as the Trump campaign blasted out in an early-morning announcement email, the move comes as he rolls out his first general election TV ads later this week, promising "additional top-flight operatives joining the movement on a near-daily basis."
Noted Never Trump critic Bill Kristol mocked the notion that Trump's gambit would pay off in the long run.
"I don’t think it matters because the problem is Donald Trump," the Weekly Standard editor told MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "You know, his unfavorable rating has been consistently too high to win a presidential election. Hillary Clinton’s, you would normally say is too high, but it’s about 10 points lower than Trump’s."
In an ordinary election where a candidate from the party of the incumbent president is treading water in terms of public approval, Republicans would generally be ahead at this point, Kristol said, while acknowledging that he could still see Trump ultimately prevailing.
Mike Murphy, the former head of Jeb Bush’s super PAC, said he was “dubious” the shakeup means Trump’s serious about changing his ways.
“You know, we've been through a couple of these. And we've got plenty of time left,” Murphy said on MSNBC. “Could Trump change? Maybe. But he's Trump. It's unlikely. Like, my Labrador could walk up to the piano and start playing. Not going to bet on it. Trump is Trump."
Paul Begala, the senior adviser to the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA, also said the campaign can shuffle around advisers all it wants — it won’t make such of a difference.
"It's the candidate, stupid," Begala remarked, borrowing a phrase from Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, on which he served as chief strategist.
Begala also compared Trump's moves to rearranging the deck chairs on the fated Titanic.
And given the Breitbart's reputation for viciously attacking the Republican establishment, there are concerns on Capitol Hill and beyond that Trump’s decision to hire Bannon may turn off some GOP allies once and for all. The grief was already starting to emerge on Wednesday, with one senior Republican aide told POLITICO, “If the underlying thinking with the move is to better enable Donald being Donald, he is toast."
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who has drawn no shortage of negative coverage from Breitbart, has remained silent so far. But Ryan spokesman Brendan Buck suggested Wednesday that he, if not his boss, were barely holding their tongues.
“I have shelved so many hot takes this morning I can’t even tell you,” Buck tweeted.
Trump campaign team shuffle
Doc Holliday says: "I agree with most of the critics that the shake-up won't help the candidate much. Trump is the problem, and Trump is and will always be Trump. His unlikeability numbers are so high that he doesn't stand a chance of getting elected. None of the blacks will vote for him, the large majority of women won't vote for him, the majority of hispanics won't vote for him, and only 20% of white voters under the age of 35 will vote for him. All he has left are white middle-class men over the age of 35, the bigots and the racists from the deep south. It's not a winning formula.
It also wouldn't surprise me to learn that Paul Manafort was the one who asked to leave the campaign and not the other way around. Trump's insistence on hiring the serial sexual predator and former Fox News chief Roger Ailes might have been the last straw. There had been rumblings for the past couple of weeks that Trump campaign officials had grown exasperated with Trump and were getting tired of working for a failing campaign that was looking more and more like it had no chance to win. In other words, Trump was out of control and why should they bother to stay on if they could no longer control him and his sinking ship?"