Apparently, Donald Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski will be entering the job market, as he has been fired reportedly at the insistence of The Donald’s three adult children. I suppose something had to give, and now the Trump for the Nuclear Codes campaign will be solidly in the hands of Paul Manafort. If you haven’t familiarized yourself with Manafort’s tortured history of lobbying for Human Rights abusers, now is the time to resolve that for yourself.
Lewandowski can comfort himself, I suppose, that he presided over an historically successful primary campaign and even managed to beat an assault rap in the process. But his strategy of “Letting Trump Be Trump” clearly wasn’t working in the general election campaign, as the polling evidence continues to mount that Trump is effectively a dead parrot, pining for the fjords.
Manafort has helped a lot of other controversial political leaders, for example, Jonas Savimbi and Ferdinand Marcos and Mobutu Sese Seko. He also had a neat role in The Karachi Affair, which I guess all Americans should now research considering the prominent role that Manafort will have in the campaign and in any future Trump White House.
I suppose Manafort will try to get Trump not to be Trump, and we’ll just have to give him a few weeks to see if he can succeed in that endeavor. In the meantime, he’ll probably face fewer roadblocks in trying to turn the campaign into something resembling a real presidential challenge.
Can we finally call this Trump 2.0?
