Preexisting relationship

Lewandowski: Trump needs staff who have a 'preexisting relationship' with him

By LOUIS NELSON

With a shakeup of the White House communications staff already underway, the president’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, offered his own prescription to fix President Donald Trump’s messaging team: more people like Corey Lewandowski.

The former Trump campaign manager, who resigned last summer amid allegations that he had assaulted a reporter, said the president would be better served by longtime allies with whom he has a “preexisting relationship.”

“When you have a communications team, they have to have that relationship with the president to understand how he communicates. Because he is the greatest communicator, as a president, we’ve ever had. He's better than the staff. He knows the media better,” Lewandowski said on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” Wednesday morning.

Lewandowski called Mike Dubke, Trump’s former communications director whose May 18 resignation was made public on Tuesday, “a very capable guy” who was nonetheless unable to adequately fulfill his duties because he arrived in the job without an understanding of how the president operates.

“When you have a president who is so active, who is so articulate, who is so good at communicating with the media, sometimes you’ve got staff who have to keep up with him, and it's much easier I think if you ask people who had a preexisting relationship to understand how the president functions,” Trump’s former campaign manager said. “That makes it much more cohesive. So just getting up to speed in a very difficult environment when you have so much negative media attention is a hard thing to do, I think, for anybody.”

Dubke’s resignation comes amid reports of a looming larger shakeup of the White House’s communications staff, one believed to include a reduction in visibility for press secretary Sean Spicer, who is no longer expected to hold daily, on-camera press briefings.

Lewandowski stopped short Wednesday morning of suggesting that he is in line for a job inside the White House, but said he would be interested in serving the president’s agenda either inside or outside the administration. POLITICO reported last week that Lewandowski and former Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie were in talks with the president to join the White House as crisis managers.

Lewandowski, who recently left the lobbying firm he started shortly after Trump’s election, was spotted at a Peet’s Coffee on Monday across the street from the White House.

“If I can be helpful, you know, I've been very clear, I want to make sure that this president's agenda gets done, which is tax reform and health care reform and building the wall on our southern border and all the things that he pledged during the campaign that he gets to execute,” Lewandowski said. “It's very important to know that I can be helpful on the outside, if they want me to be helpful on the inside and the right role is there, you know, I would be willing to consider that.”