When Trump told former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski “you’re fired” on Monday morning, it marked a decisive shift in Trump’s campaign as the presumptive Republican nominee finally accepts the advice of those who have urged him to “pivot” towards the general election. The question is whether Trump, who has long claimed that he can be “more presidential than anybody other than the great Abe Lincoln”, can actually transform himself mid-campaign.
Trump announced his candidacy last year by denouncing Mexico for sending “rapists” over the border to the US, and has stoked controversy in almost every public appearance since. The result not only made Trump a historically polarizing figure but also played a key role in making the New York real estate developer the presumptive Republican nominee.
Lewandowski has long been an advocate of Trump continuing his non-traditional approach to running a presidential campaign. His motto – “let Trump be Trump” – has defined the real estate mogul’s effort. The big rallies, constant controversy and media omnipresence has stood in stark contrast to the approach taken by any other presidential campaign. To Lewandowski, Trump’s central message that he was a self-funding outsider untainted by the Washington establishment had to define every aspect of the campaign. If Trump was truly going to be an unconventional candidate, he had to run an unconventional campaign.
This led to a polarizing split on this campaign.
It was a conflict over this approach that led longtime Trump consigliere Roger Stone to leave the campaign. It also fueled Lewandowski’s fights with his longtime rival and now replacement Paul Manafort. Both Manafort and Stone, who are former business partners, pushed Trump to run a more traditional campaign. This didn’t necessarily mean transforming Trump into a political automaton with a flag pin, a scripted stump speech and a pathological addiction to speaking in platitudes. Instead, it simply meant doing basic blocking and tacking, hiring pollsters and communications staffers, building up a donor base and making a significant investment in paid media.
To Lewandowski, who described Trump in an interview with CNN on Monday as “having the finger on the pulse of the American public”, many of the accoutrements of a conventional campaign were unnecessary baubles designed to enrich Beltway consultants and serve as crutches for those far less politically gifted than his boss.
But until recently, Lewandowski, who accompanied Trump everywhere, was considered untouchable within the campaign. He had only become more vulnerable as Trump began to fade in the polls. Just as Manafort first emerged in March, when Ted Cruz won delegate contest after delegate contest, Lewandowski’s position weakened with every general election poll that saw the presumptive Republican nominee lagging behind Hillary Clinton. He was left vulnerable and weakened, primed for the coup de grâce which came on Monday morning.
But the dispute wasn’t simply about strategy. Instead, the brash, hot-tempered Lewandowski had also increasingly alienated many in and around the campaign.
One source familiar with the campaign said Lewandowski had clashed with Ivanka Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, and was even trying to plant negative stories about Trump’s son-in-law in the press. Another source suggested that the final straw for Lewandowski was “some conflict between him and Hope Hicks that Ivanka [Trump] didn’t like”. Lewandowski and Hicks reportedly engaged in a public screaming match in midtown Manhattan last month. The two had long been considered close and constantly accompanied Trump on the campaign trail.
Campaign sources were sanguine about his departure. One noted that while Lewandowski “did a great job in getting us to where we are now, it’s a different sort of mindset that needs to come in [for a general election]”. But what was made clear is that “the main person is the candidate. He’s not going to change.”
Without Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign is likely to become significantly more professional. It will take on more Beltway trappings, more pollsters, more flacks and more of the polished sheen typical of presidential candidates in the 21st century.
But it’s unclear whether those changes will transform Trump into a more traditional politician, and if, after nearly a year of provocations and controversy, anything will change the public perception of Trump among swing voters.
