A full ten months after he announced for president, Donald Trump finally moved to install professional political operatives at the head of his campaign.
His current team, led by campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, had been caught flatfooted in protecting Trump’s interests as states started picking actual delegates to the GOP convention. “They were either the gang who couldn’t shoot straight or the gang that didn’t even show up,” according to Marilyn Marks, a former Trump supporter from Colorado who left the campaign in part because of its ineptitude.
Trump has responded to this chaos by effectively putting the campaign in the hands of two political pros. Paul Manafort, a former business partner of bombastic Trump consigliere Roger Stone, is the overall strategist. Rick Wiley, the former campaign manager for Scott Walker’s crash-landed presidential bid, is taking over the job of national political director. Lewandowski, who learned only yesterday he wouldn’t be prosecuted for his alleged battery of a female reporter, is still on staff but in a diminished role.
The new arrangement has, if anything, led to more confusion.
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“There are two campaigns being run in Trump world. And nothing is happening because no one is sure who they’re supposed to be listening to,” one operative told Politico. He noted that some staffers were receiving different instructions from Lewandowski and Manafort. Access to a staff directory is restricted, and so employees can’t even find out who the new hires are.
#share#On one level, Wiley would appear to be a good choice to turn the currently dysfunctional operation into a cohesive team. As a former political director for the Republican National Committee, Wiley knows how to build an organization and knows the ins and outs of the GOP delegate selection process.
Wiley is “persona non grata with Scott Walker and those in his orbit,” a leading Wisconsin conservative who worked closely with the Walker campaign told me. “He built a campaign structure for Walker that was gold-plated, blustering, and self-promotional — a lot like the Trump model of doing business.”
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He recalls being invited to one strategy meeting at Walker headquarters in Madison, Wis., and being stunned by the fact that over 100 staffers and outsiders were there. “It was a wretched excess of consultants,” he recalls. “Wiley was like the dopey character in the Steve Martin movie who was able to turn $1 million worth of real estate into $25 in cash.” NRO’s Eliana Johnson has detailed the bloat in the Walker campaign, which employed three times as many staffers as did Marco Rubio’s.
Wiley probably views his reemergence on the national stage as a chance for political redemption, and in Trump he certainly has a client who could spend big money on his campaign even if he has starved it of critical resources for now. But Wiley’s track record has been uneven. Before Walker’s Icarus-like campaign crashed, Wiley’s last presidential effort was Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 campaign. He was Guiliani’s deputy national political director, in charge of setting up the ground game in primaries for the former New York mayor. The Giuliani campaign raised over $60 million and wound up winning the same amount of delegates as did Scott Walker — zero.
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Trump has done far better so far with vastly fewer resources, a torrent of free media coverage, and the force of his personality. He still has a realistic chance of winning the GOP nomination on the first ballot. So far, he has preferred to whine about the alleged unfairness of the delegate process, even though, because of winner-take-all rules in many states, he has garnered 45 percent of the delegates, significantly better than the 37 percent of the popular vote he has won in the primaries and caucuses.
#related#Having delegate hunters and counters who will give him accurate information on what is happening on the ground can only help Trump. Neither Manafort or Wiley are known for hiding bad news — unlike Lewandowski, who apparently failed to inform Trump last month that he had been outmaneuvered out of several Louisiana delegates by the canny Cruz operation. Trump learned of his loss only when confronted about it by Jonathan Karl of ABC News on a live Sunday broadcast.
Trump’s effort to professionalize his campaign is convincing some skeptical Washington observers that he is at least serious about getting the basics of winning the nomination right. Already, the candidate appears to be stumbling into fewer rhetorical flytraps. But the famously cheap Donald Trump had better realize fast that his new campaign style will cost him not just his freedom to say any outrageous thing he wants at any time. It will also probably cost him a lot more money then he planned to spend.