Ding dong the witch is dead

Trump reboots flailing campaign

Amid signs of division and disorganization, the presumptive GOP nominee makes a bold move.

By Gabriel Debenedetti and Daniel Lippman

For months, senior adviser Paul Manafort spearheaded the effort urging Donald Trump to dial it back a little and pursue a more conventional tack that would keep campaign drama and controversy at a minimum.

Campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, on the other hand, insisted the presumptive GOP nominee should continue at full throttle. “Let Trump be Trump” was his mantra.

On Monday, Manafort’s argument won.

The abrupt ouster of Lewandowski, less than one month prior to the Republican National Convention, suggested that Trump’s recent slide in the polls — and the growing evidence that his campaign has fallen far behind in executing general-election fundamentals — has finally sparked a rethinking of the campaign’s approach, beginning at the top.

“If it signals that Donald Trump is taking his responsibility to pivot to a general election posture seriously, then it is good news,” said Michael Steel, a former adviser to Jeb Bush and John Boehner. “If not, it’s continuing the narrative of chaos and division that has marked his candidacy so far.”

In recent elections, similar high-level shake-ups have been a hallmark of ultimately doomed campaigns. After she fell into an early hole in her first presidential bid in 2008, Hillary Clinton in February of that year replaced campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle with Maggie Williams, another longtime adviser. The previous July, with his campaign floundering, John McCain had replaced campaign manager Terry Nelson and top aide John Weaver — a move that set him on the path to winning the nomination, though the Arizona senator fell short against President Barack Obama in the general election.

The Trump campaign change in leadership has an added element of risk — it’s taking place far later in the election cycle, just 140 days from the November election. And it’s taking place at a time when a national campaign is already expected to have in place a serious ground infrastructure and television plan.

Instead, Democratic field teams in some swing states alone have more employees than Trump’s entire national staff. Clinton and her allies are set to hit Trump with nearly $50 million worth of swing state advertising in the coming weeks, but his campaign has no ad plan to fight back. The constellation of super PACs wishing to support Trump isn’t able to fill the void, largely because the monthslong war for control between Manafort and Lewandowski led to an effective freeze in their activity.

Trump’s fundraising operation — once overseen by Lewandowski — is also lagging.

While Clinton and her affiliated outside organizations have raised roughly $300 million, the presumptive GOP nominee’s operation is just beginning to get off the ground.

High-ranking Republicans — as well as Trump’s long-standing critics — have expressed surprise and dismay at the lack of organization in Trump’s ranks, which they fear is likely to damage the party’s down-ballot prospects.

“The idea that firing a staffer shows some kind of competence when your advertising, your campaign infrastructure, your data infrastructure, the offensive nature of your rhetoric, your campaign is a dumpster fire and it’s not because of one staffer, it’s because of the candidate,” said Rory Cooper, a senior adviser to Never Trump PAC. “This is not a real campaign to begin with. They have a half-dozen people and are relying on the RNC to do almost all of the heavy lifting that a normal campaign does, which is near impossible, especially when the RNC is going to have to focus on protecting the House and Senate seats that Donald Trump puts in danger.”

Until recently, the Trump campaign was able to fend off such criticism by pointing to the success of the campaign’s unorthodox approach during the primary season and Trump’s unprecedented ability to command the news cycle.

But the GOP’s get-it-together chorus grew louder and more insistent in recent days as Trump’s national polling deficit against Clinton grew to 6 points in the RealClearPolitics average as of Monday — twice as much as Obama’s over Mitt Romney in June 2012 — and his unfavorable ratings hit record-breaking levels.

All of it has occurred against the backdrop of several weeks of nonstop controversy surrounding Trump’s suggestion that an Indiana-born judge of Mexican heritage would be unfair to him because of his proposal to build a border wall — and his refusal to back off the remarks — and Trump’s self-congratulatory response to the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida.

To many Republicans, the two episodes reflected a lack of discipline and a political tone-deafness that could be deadly in the general election.

“Trump’s campaign is in free fall. There is not a single aspect of the campaign that is in good shape; he has messaging, finance, political, organizational problems and on the current trajectory, he will suffer an embarrassing defeat this fall,” said Alex Conant, former communications director for the Marco Rubio campaign. “Effectively, [Trump] doesn’t have a campaign. … He’s had two months now to consolidate conservative support, and aside from one or two symbolic actions like the NRA speech and the list of judges, both of which he subsequently undermined, he’s done nothing to unite Republicans, and I think arguably his standing among Republicans is worse than it was a month ago.”

Lewandowski’s sudden dismissal was a clear move to put an end to such hand-wringing and frustration. It was the New Hampshire native, after all, who was the campaign’s biggest proponent of Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip style. He clashed repeatedly with Manafort over the latter’s insistence that the candidate act more “presidential” — a suggestion that Trump himself bristled against at times, figuring he’d gotten far enough without dramatically altering his campaign-trail persona.

An alum of the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity network, Lewandowski ran the Trump operation despite having no presidential campaign experience. Although he managed to guide Trump to the nomination, his large paychecks and his decision to travel constantly with the candidate raised eyebrows, and his hard-charging style made him a polarizing character. He drew the most fire when he was charged — but not ultimately convicted — in Florida with simple battery for grabbing a reporter, praising Trump’s loyalty to him throughout the saga.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Lewandowski had been locked in an ugly power struggle with Manafort, a veteran GOP operative and former business partner of longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone who joined the campaign in late March. As Manafort urged Trump to take a more professional tone and approach to the campaign, and while Trump’s children — themselves advisers — started to clash with Lewandowski as well, the campaign manager found his role fluctuating.

“Corey was there from the beginning, worked with Donald, traveled with him every day, and so Donald had given him wide latitude. The problem is once you’ve gone past the nomination, he’s never been involved in a national campaign. It’s not his fault if he didn’t know what to do,” said Charlie Black, a veteran Republican operative who handled convention strategy for Ohio Gov. John Kasich and used to work with Stone and Manafort. “It’s a huge difference. Look, it’s a miracle they got through the primary process with one press person. You can’t do a general election campaign without a communications operation. … Whenever there’s divided leadership headed in different directions, you need to resolve it and put somebody in charge, and it’s to Donald’s credit that he did.”

When the final ax came down on Monday, some of the internal campaign tensions burst into the open.

“Ding dong the witch is dead,” tweeted Michael Caputo, a campaign adviser who leads the operation in New York, linking to the song from “The Wizard of Oz.”

Caputo resigned later in the day in a letter to Manafort, expressing regret for his “too exuberant” reaction.

Lewandowski, engaging in some damage control after his ouster, insisted there was no bad blood between him and Manafort.

“When Paul [Manafort] first came in, he was going to manage the delegate process. And then we were fortunate enough to secure enough delegates that we didn’t need a delegate manager. Since that time, Paul and I have gotten along amazingly well, and I know the media doesn’t want to report that, but we work side by side, talking on a daily basis, multiple times a day,” he said on CNN Monday. “He had his roles which he was going to oversee on the campaign. I had a very separate function, which included making sure that Mr. Trump’s schedule goes accordingly … there was no animosity between Paul and I.”

Lewandowski isn’t going away. He’s set to rise again next month — as the leader of New Hampshire’s delegation to the national convention.