Donald Trump starting to sour on Paul Manafort.

Winning New York last week (and probably winning tonight) did not, as some might have expected, tamp down the war of leaks inside the Donald Trump campaign; in fact, the internal griping and mud-throwing has increased. And, of course, Politico is More than happy to help out with that*. The latest edition of the ongoing vicious-gossip fest reveals that Trump is allegedly reconsidering taking quite so much power away from embattled campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and has accordingly ‘recalibrated’ by taking some of the money-making decisions away from lobbyist crony / delegate wrangler Paul Manafort. Oh, and that Trump hates acting like a real, live grown-up when running for President, so Trump’s going to not do that as much.

Let me quote a paragraph from the Politico article to give you an idea of the back-biting going on here. It’s pretty good. More to the point, it’s pretty standard Washington-insider-griping:

“I think it pisses [Trump] off that he was getting free television by going on the shows and now Paul Manafort is out there resurrecting his career,” said one campaign operative. Citing Manafort’s advocacy within the campaign for an expensive advertising push in upcoming states, the operative said Trump is “saying I can get on every show I want for free and you’re telling me not to do that and that I should pay for my advertising? That doesn’t pass the smell test to me.”

Needless to say, if that ‘campaign operative’ is not Corey Lewandowski himself then Lewandowski was in the room when the ‘campaign operative’ gave that quote. I mean, the anonymous source is repeating stuff that Trump said in confidence, and in the expectation that it would not appear in Politico and RedState articles with malice aforethought.  But the source did it anyway, just because it allowed for a couple of good knocks against Manafort. Which is, again, fairly typical for a ‘Republican’ campaign whose inner core has collectively decided that the Democrats are the opposition, the Republicans are the enemy – and the rival faction inside the campaign is beloved of Lucifer Morningstar.

(Via @TheRickWilson)

Moe Lane

PS: Also according to this Politico article, Trump was apparently not aware that Paul Manafort was a lobbyist for all sorts of awful and corrupt regimes (including at least one that Trump himself has railed against). That is… alarming. I remember that took all of five minutes of Google searching to get Manafort’s history; it was reasonable to assume that Donald Trump knew how unsavory a choice he was making, but decided to go with Manafort anyway because there were no better options.  The idea that Trump instead simply didn’t know that he had hired a lobbyist for the Saudi regime should alarm anybody with a lick of common sense.

*Not that we can judge Politico for that. I cheerfully wrote this up, didn’t I? And you just as cheerfully clicked through.

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