The Unhappy Campaign Of Paul Manafort
Manafort had reason to know this from the start ― and reason to know that his advice would be ignored.
The taco bowl incident, trivial though it was, is one example. On Cinco de Mayo, Trump happened to be eating a taco bowl for lunch at his desk in Trump Tower. Manafort was in the office with other aides when a member of the family suggested they tweet a picture of Trump enjoying his “Mexican” lunch.
Manafort politely suggested that this might be seen as condescending and cautioned against it. The tweet went out. Trump himself was delighted by the resulting controversy. “The people who were offended were people we wanted to offend,” he later said.
A super-confident bearing is essential in Manafort’s main trade, which involves advising foreign authoritarian leaders on how to win elections using old-style American tactics.
But the fact is that Manafort, as shrewd and capable as he is, never managed a presidential campaign, or any high-level American campaign effort. He is a master of conventions and delegate counting, which is an insiders’ game. He is not an outward-facing message, media and U.S. voting expert.
.. “Paul’s knowledge, such as it is, is about 20 years old,” said a longtime adviser to Trump, who declined to be identified and is not in the Lewandowski camp. “He doesn’t know the new demographics or the new media.
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Rather, the GOP presidential nominee maintains a floating array of power centers around him. His office can be crowded with sub-groups vying for attention, undercutting each other. He plays them off against each other, which allows him to keep his options open and deny chain-of-command responsibility that a hierarchy would impose.