Could someone clarify the differences between Manafort and Lewandowski?
Paul Manafort is a quite bit older than Corey Lewandowski. Manafort also has a thicker head of hair, which I suspect he dyes. Lewandowski is leaner than Manafort. Those are some differences off the top of my head.
That’s kind of a silly question. For one thing, Manafort has been working campaigns since Lewadowski has been in diapers including 6 presidential campaigns.
Seriously, is Trump trying to lose?
He has 30 paid staff on the ground. 30. He’s relying on the party…the party who hates him…to carry the water in battleground states.
Lewandowski has still managed to get people fired, such as political director Rick Wiley. If Manafort is actually in control now, and more than just a figurehead for Trump, that signifies a significant change. Whether it’s too little, too late is up for debate.
[QUOTE=NPR]
Lewandowski has been with Trump since he began his presidential run, managing his shoestring operation. But as Trump has moved into the general election, a more traditional campaign structure largely managed by Paul Manafort, a former Ronald Reagan aide, has emerged. Within the campaign, Manafort and Lewandowski have been seen as competing forces. A campaign source told NPR that Trump previously had liked the competitiveness between the two.
(snip)
Manafort was brought on earlier this year to help professionalize the skeletal, disorganized Trump operation. But there was reportedly tension between the two, with Lewandowski wanting to keep the same approach that had worked before, while Manafort worked to make Trump pivot to a more disciplined general-election approach.
[/QUOTE]
I can only view this as bad news (for anyone but Trump supporters). Lewandowski appeared to be a proponent of “Let Trump be Trump,” which worked in the primary but of course has resulted in an endless stream of bullshit that the wider electorate doesn’t (seem to) like. I’d prefer them to keep doing what they’re doing than actually try to change course to a more professional operation. Let’s hope that the newly-empowered Manafort is unable to contain Cheeto Jesus.
So what happens if the NeverTrump folks find a way to keep him off the ballot?
I’m not talking about a potential Trumper Tantrum attempt at spoiling (I read an article positing that Trump may very well be willing to turn down the nomination so long as he is officially offered it), but about the GOP’s campaign efforts following all this. Is it too late to get a proper machine rolling? Will they nominate a placeholder, cede the election to Hillary altogether, and focus entirely on the down ticket votes?
Meanwhile, party officials in such battleground states as Arizona and Utah are struggling to beat Clinton’s lead there.
I’ll reserve judgment on this whole Lewendowski thing until adaher gets here to explain why it spells doom for Hillary Clinton.
Judging by his Twitter account, somebody has been keeping a tight rein on Trump over the past few days.
Well, its Monday, is that one of his “centrist” days?
The most likely explanation remains that Trump is incompetent and trying to run a campaign on the cheap.
I know it makes people feel smart to think they’ve seen through someone of great depth, but all the evidence points to Trump being a lot like Carson, only with people skills and salesmanship (not the same as actual business acumen) instead of neurosurgery as the one and only thing he’s good at. That stuff sends you sailing through the process of financing the casino but doesn’t make you capable of running it; it allows you to dominate a weak and divided primary field but makes you falter once you have to get nontrivial numbers of votes from the population as a whole.
Trump isn’t even good at getting people as a whole on his side. He’s too far to the “brash asshole” side of the spectrum of male behavior, to the point he’s actively off-putting to a large fraction of the country, male and female. And, of course, he’s said some really, amazingly, incredibly stupid shit, some of it before he decided to run for the presidency of a country which contains Mexicans, Muslims, and people who aren’t the primate equivalent of festering open sores.
He is, however, astonishingly successful among a certain kind of person. The fact that person represents a good third or so of the modern Republican primary electorate is just his good fortune. The further fact that the GOP couldn’t convince the primary field to winnow sufficiently to stop him is the second part of the cascading failure that party is now marked by. It’s like watching a train wreck, in that it can’t be blamed on any one thing: The locomotive was going the wrong way to begin with, and the dumb SOBs cheaped out on the brakes.
In this, as in so much of his life, Trump was born on third and thinks he scored a touchdown from the three-point line. He’s the beneficiary of a political party’s cascading failure which has been in progress for four-plus decades now. Comes the hour, comes the man, and he’s in-your-face enough to stain the fabric of the party for a long time to come, but that doesn’t mean he planned any more than a tiny piece of his ultimate role.
Trump is, first and foremost, an opportunist. He saw an opening and filled a hole, and now he’s not going away until his force is spent. However, he lacks the fundamentals required to go all the way, so he’s bound to blow up and make a messy exit somewhere short of the finish line.
Actually doing something as technical and as detail-oriented as running a good general election campaign against a real opponent is simply too far out of his comfort zone. He only got this far due to decades’ worth of the incompetence of others.
Dude, please, this is a family show!
puke smiley
There’s no way he’d do that, unless he plans on retiring from business too. He’d destroy his brand with the only people who care about it.
Don’t ask me for cites, but in reading their Twitter feeds, the general tenor among Repubs is that they still think that this race can still be salvaged into something recognizable… maybe not into a winning race, but into one that doesn’t taint the brand both inside and outside the party.
And I just dont see how that’s possible as there are no good options in this for them.
But… there is a worst option.
The worst option for the Republicans is, in my humble opinion, if their schoolyard bully of a candidate actually wins this thing. He will literally be uncontrollable, bound to the RNC by nothing, and they will have no option but to join the opposition to stop him, sounding the death knell of the Republican party. He will use the powers of the Presidency to go after the federal judiciary as much as he will use the powers of the judiciary to go after Hillary Clinton, that disabled reporter, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, and anybody over the past 70 years who have wronged him, which will include every Republican who did not kiss his ass this year, which is a fuck-lot of them.
If they go into September with him as their candidate, it really may be the end of the Republican party.
All this imho of course.
Remember the old saying of “follow the money”? In this campaign we have to ask Trump “Where is the money?”
Here is Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-real-news-is-trump-is-broke
I forgot to add:
IMHO this fits with what some reported was the original plan of Trump, to finish the primaries just with very strong numbers, to be in the race as a protest candidate and to enrich himself later with the fame and list of supporters.
I think that now it is “oh S***! I have to spent close to a billion to continue?” time, and that was not really part of his plan.
He didn’t just fill a hole.
I’d guess Manafort can only minimally contain Trump. Trump thinks he’s smarter than everyone, so even if someone gives him good advice it would be surprising if he followed it. Almost every time he’s given a speech from a Teleprompter he can’t help but going off script. The campaign will probably be better with Manafort in and Lewandowski out, but I don’t think it’s going to be what puts him on top.
Yeah, he hasn’t said anything too outrageous the last few days, he’s been mainly tweeting about the recent rallies he did. But those rallies were in Texas, where he doesn’t exactly need to shore up his support.
This article in the Washington Post made me feel better about the whole Trump campaign, I knew it was going badly but I didn’t realize how bad.
That’s enough of that, right there. No shots at other posters.