Bill Kristol Dismisses Campaign Shakeup – Says ‘Problem Is Donald Trump’

He told the news agency that Paul Manafort will remain as his campaign chair. The candidate believes he can achieve this by adding more capable individuals to his thinly staffed campaign. That job had been officially vacant, with Manafort assuming numerous duties, since Trump fired previous campaign manager Corey Lewandowski back in June. The Mercers couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday.

The campaign shakeup, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, comes as polls show Trump trailing Clinton nationally and in key battleground states following a hard campaign stretch that saw him insulting the Muslim parents of a U.S. Army soldier who died in Iraq and temporarily refraining from endorsing House Speaker Paul Ryan in his primary race.

“I am who I am”.

“You’ve got a candidate that wants to win. I think it’s about management and making sure you have the right number of people in place to manage an organization that has grown dramatically”. “I mean you have to be you”.

The decision to shake up the campaign came over the weekend, the person familiar with the matter said.

“I don’t think it matters because the problem is Donald Trump”, Kristol said in an interview on the Morning Joe program, Politico reported.

Luntz also praised former Fox News boss Roger Ailes, who is talking to good pal Trump.

Clinton is leading Trump, 47.3 percent to 41.2 percent, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average. “They are longtime friends, but he has no formal or informal role in the campaign”, Hicks said in a statement.

Manafort is keeping his title.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the campaign shakeup, which has been confirmed by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Bannon is a former Goldman Sachs banker and does not bring presidential campaign experience to Trump’s White House bid. “He has officially won the fight to let Trump be Trump”.

Trump’s poll numbers, both nationally and in battleground states, have plummeted since the conventions.

“It is imperative we continue to expand our team with top-tier talent”.

The general election, as Donald Trump’s new campaign manager sees it, needs to be more like a tennis match. It also highlights the degree to which Trump, a media-conscious reality television star, seems more preoccupied with courting the conservative audience he already has than expanding his political base in order to win the election.

Bannon has been described, in a Bloomberg profile previously cited by the Trump campaign, as the country’s “most unsafe political operative”. The first, Corey Lewandowski, was dismissed in June after helping Trump clinch the nomination during a combative primary race. Mr. Bannon will take a leave of absence from Breitbart. A prosecutor later dropped a simple battery charge against him. That prompted GOP officials to criticize their nominee for going off script and to urge him to construct a more disciplined campaign.

Green also reported that Andrew Breitbart had “described Bannon, with honest admiration, as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement”. GAI famously published 2015’s Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, a controversial tome that laid the groundwork for a slew of anti-Clinton reports.

The changes will likely prove advantageous for Trump.