I remember watching an interview with him while Al and I were waiting for the race to come on. I think it was "This week with George Stephanopoulos". He rolled his eyes so many times and was so condescending it was just unforgettable to watch. He was only campaign chairman for Trump for a few months. The main reason I remember that particular interview is, it was the first time I had heard of the Trump campaigns strategy of making NAFTA (and free trade in general) an issue particularly in the upper Midwestern states like, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan who had seen their manufacturing base shredded to pieces. For the first time I actually had a feeling in my gut that was akin to "Oh shit, that might just work." Until I had heard that I wasn't all that concerned about Trump or his campaign.
So here is the question, who in the Trump campaign is politically astute enough to have come up with that strategy? Seriously, which of these brainiacs is smart enough to have come up with it? Who took credit for that winning strategy after Trump's victory? Nobody from what I could tell.
Know what I think? I don't think it was any of the members of the Trump campaign that came up with this strategy. If so, they would have been all over the airwaves trying to market themselves as the next Karl Rove, lord know they all seem to love their money. Nobody ever did.
There is, however, a very savvy person that lives in Moscow.
Chairman of Donald Trump's 2016 United States Presidential campaign
In March 2016, he joined the presidential campaign of Donald Trump to lead Trump's "delegate-corralling" efforts. In June 2016, Trump fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski
and promoted Manafort to the position. Manafort gained control of the
daily operations of the campaign as well as an expanded $20 million
budget, hiring decisions, advertising, and media strategy.[19][20][21][22]
On June 9, 2016, Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner were participants in a meeting with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya and several others at Trump Tower. A British music agent, saying he was acting on behalf of Emin Agalarov and the Russian government, had told Trump Jr. that he could obtain damaging information on Hillary Clinton if he met with a lawyer connected to the Kremlin.[23] At first Trump Jr. said the meeting had been about the Magnitsky Act; later he said the offer of information about Clinton had been a pretext to conceal Veselnitskaya's real agenda.[24]
In August 2016, Manafort's connections to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions
drew national attention in the USA, where it was reported that Manafort
may have illegally received $12.7 million in off-the-books funds from
the Party of Regions.[25] On August 17, 2016, Donald Trump received his first security briefing.[26] Also, on August 17, 2016, the New York Times
reported on an internal staff memorandum from Manafort stating that
Manafort would "remain the campaign chairman and chief strategist,
providing the big-picture, long-range campaign vision".[27] However, two days later, Trump announced his acceptance of Manafort's resignation from the campaign after Stephen Bannon and Kellyanne Conway took on senior leadership roles within that campaign.[28][29]
(It's also interesting to me that two days after Trump's first National Security Briefing he was let go as campaign chair.)
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