Lagging in fundraising, Trump calls on GOP for more support

“Perhaps the termination of Corey Lewandowski, heretofore Mr. Trump’s most loyal aide who was present at the campaign’s creation, is his concession that his operation is dysfunctional”, the piece says.

Reached Monday, he said only that Manafort “has been in operational control of the campaign since April 7”. He has yet to rally against the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, Hillary Clinton, with his poll numbers dropping and Republicans bewildered at how he lost ground to Clinton after the mass shooting last week in Orlando by a man who declared loyalty to the Islamic State terrorist group.

His appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor” came after a day when his campaign manager was sacked amid an internal campaign power struggle with Paul Manafort, the veteran operative who since March has been amassing influence inside Trump HQ, a campaign source told Fox News.

The former Jeb Bush backer said his first Presidential pick was the wrong choice and when the Trump campaign called, he made a decision to hear them out.

Hope Hicks, who single-handedly fields Trump’s media inquiries, disputed reports she had complained about Lewandowski to Ivanka Trump.

The fundraising reports showed donors gave his campaign about $3 million in May, even though he enjoyed presumptive nominee status for nearly the entire month.

Trump is under growing pressure to build a credible general election campaign.

Known for his brusque manner, Lewandowski was accused of manhandling a female reporter in Florida during the primary campaign, but the battery charge against him was later dropped. Lewandowski had been with the Republican presidential candidate since the beginning of his campaign. Trump defended Lewandowski throughout the episode. He was communications director and press secretary for Lugar, R-Ind., for eight years in the late 1980s and 1990s and a campaign aide for Dan Coats when Coats was elected to the Senate from in in 2010. They are also required to return or destroy any documents that contains confidential information after their collaboration with Donald Trump’s campaign stops.

“I heard that Lewandowski was going to be removed”, he said recalling his initial reaction to Lewandowski’s firing on Monday.

But Walker says he thinks House Speaker Paul Ryan is “legitimate” in saying delegates should be free to vote their conscience.

The former secretary of state has already assembled a national campaign with hundreds of paid staffers backed by millions of dollars in battleground-state television advertising.

“I knew it was two things – Number 1: It was a mistake, and Number 2: If I left it to the campaign leadership to deal with this, like an amateur, my fate was going to be sealed”.