Paul Manafort is the rarest of professional pitchmen: one who knows how to sell to a salesman.
.. The letters and memos provide a telling glimpse into how Mr. Trump invited an enigmatic international fixer .. to the apex of his campaign with a minimum of vetting. The answer? Through family and friends, handshakes and hyperbole.
.. the memos that described Mr. Manafort in terms that Mr. Trump would like, calling him “the most experienced and lethal of managers” and “a killer.”
.. Manafort urged the recalcitrant candidate to restrain his attacks on fellow Republicans, to stick to a script and, above all, to spend more money on organizing and ads.
.. Mr. Trump thought Mr. Manafort was not tough enough
.. He began by telling the candidate he lived on an upper floor of Trump Tower. This was no trivial point: It signaled his wealth and a willingness to work 15-hour days in a building that housed both his lavish apartment and Mr. Trump’s bare-bones campaign. It also meant Mr. Manafort had already put his money — in the form of an apartment purchase — into Mr. Trump’s brand, which meant a lot to the candidate, a transactional developer and politician, aides said.
Mr. Manafort’s friendship with Mr. Barrack, the private equity investor, helped, too. Mr. Barrack, who did not respond to a request for comment, is one of the few people whom Mr. Trump trusts.
.. Mr. Manafort cast himself as a onetime insider who had turned on the establishment — and a tough guy who would go after Mr. Trump’s harshest critics among the Republican elite.
.. At one point, he described Karl Rove, a former adviser to George W. Bush who was organizing an anti-Trump effort, as “my blood enemy in politics, going back to the College in the 1960s.”
.. a bitter fight for leadership of the College Republicans that pitted a candidate backed by Mr. Manafort and his close friend Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant, against Mr. Rove and Lee Atwater.
.. cast himself as a warrior against the party’s conservatives, even at a time when Mr. Trump was reaching out to the right wing and courting evangelical Christians
.. “I have had to confront the Extreme Right, Tea Party, Rush Limbaughs etc.”