Donald Trump called his new hires "extremely capable, highly qualified people who love to win and know how to win."
Trump's campaign takes a turn to the far right
The unmistakable, remarkable message of the hire of far-right Breitbart executive Stephen Bannon: if Trump is going down, he is going down Trump-ing.
By Daniel DaleWashington Bureau
Wed., Aug. 17, 2016timer4 min. read
WASHINGTON—Say goodbye to the gentle and disciplined Donald Trump.
Trump has never been gentle and disciplined, you say? He evidently disagrees. With a campaign shakeup on Wednesday, the Republican nominee signalled that he believes he is getting walloped in the presidential election not because he has been too belligerent and unscripted but too soft and conventional.
The unmistakable, remarkable message: if Donald Trump is going down, he is going down Trump-ing.
His new campaign chief executive is Stephen Bannon, until now the executive chairman of a conspiratorial, far-right website, Breitbart News, that has essentially served as a propaganda organ for his campaign — "Trump Pravda," in the words of former editor-at-large Ben Shapiro. His new campaign manager is Kellyanne Conway, a veteran strategist and pollster who previously had been tasked with improving his dismal standing among women.
Conway, who has her own history of inflammatory remarks, is a relatively conventional hire. But this is Bannon's campaign now. The former Goldman Sachs investment banker, navy officer and maker of right-wing documentaries is a bomb-throwing outsider who, according to Washington Post reporter Robert Costa, has convinced Trump that the rest of the campaign needs to be a "bare-knuckles brawl."
Republican elites have for months pleaded with Trump to "pivot" to a more inclusive message, a softer tone, a reduced emphasis on his loyal white-male base. Trump's hires suggest, in the words of FiveThirtyEight analyst Nate Silver, a pivot of "360 degrees" — all the way back to the pugilistic, whites-focused way he won the Republican primary.
"Huge rallies. Gloves off. Brutal fights with Clinton. Heavy emphasis on nationalism and populism. That's the Bannon strategy," Costa wrote on Twitter.
Trump, in a statement, described Bannon and Conway as "extremely capable, highly qualified people who love to win and know how to win."
Robby Mook, the campaign manager for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, told reporters they were now preparing to face an onslaught of "wild accusations," calling Breitbart "a so-called news site that peddles divisive, at times racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories." Even harsher reactions came from conservative Trump critics astonished that the untested and incendiary Bannon had been handed the keys to a general-election campaign.
The hire solidifies the takeover of the party by people and themes once consigned to the fringes. Under Bannon, Breitbart had eagerly embraced the "alt-right," an online conservative movement focused on white identity and frequently accused of racism.
"We are now moving beyond a dumpster fire. We're more at Chernobyl," conservative pundit Erick Erickson wrote on his website The Resurgent.
"We joke about inmates taking over the asylum. With the Trump campaign, it has actually happened," Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney's chief strategist in 2012, wrote on Twitter.
"Trump's campaign has now entered the Hospice Phase. He knows he's dying and wants to surround himself with his loved ones," Charlie Sykes, a top conservative radio host in Wisconsin, wrote on Twitter.
Bannon directed The Undefeated, a positive 2011 film about Sarah Palin, and wrote Clinton Cash, a negative 2015 film about foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation. Jim Hanson, executive vice-president of the far-right Center for Security Policy, called him a "messaging machine" ideally suited to "help Trump fight the media weasels."
"He is a person who, I think a little bit like myself, is a bit of a street fighter, a person who is willing to go right at his opponents," former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said on CNN. "If you look at Stephen Bannon and what they've built at Breitbart, it's win at all cost, and I really think that makes people on the left very afraid, because they are willing to say and do things that others in the mainstream media wouldn't do."
The move sidelines the man who had been running the show, experienced strategist Paul Manafort. Manafort, who will keep his title of campaign chairman, has been plagued this week by controversies related to a career partly spent advising foreign authoritarians. The Associated Press reported Wednesday that he had helped Ukraine's pro-Russia ruling party secretly funnel $2.2 million (U.S.) to Washington lobbying firms.
But this, by all accounts, was not why Trump effectively replaced him. Trump, rather, had fumed about Manafort's attempts to turn him into something more closely resembling a traditional candidate, though there were few signs that he had been heeding the advice.
"I am who I am. It's me. I don't want to change. Everyone talks about, 'Oh, well you're going to pivot.' I don't want to pivot," he told Wisconsin's WKBT television on Tuesday.
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