There goes the neighborhood Boy. Trump is back with 80 days to kill.
Donald Trump's decision to depose campaign chief Paul Manafort in favor of two loyalists signals one thing: The Republican presidential nominee's brief flirtation with being a more packaged and conventional candidate is over. Trump wants to win or, more likely, lose on his own terms — by being exactly who he has been throughout his life.
In April, Manafort was brought into a campaign that was flailing as it tried to transition from gritty outsider to presumptive nominee. He replaced Corey Lewandowski, an outspoken advocate of the "let Trump be Trump" strategy. The move was seen at the time as Trump's acknowledgment that the sort of say-anything-at-any-time strategy that had carried him to a shocking primary victory was insufficient for the general election challenge he now faced. It was also regarded as a bow to the power of the Trump children, who had long agitated for Lewandowski to be removed, and an attempt by Trump to reach out to a party establishment he had lambasted during his rapid rise to the Republican nomination.
The pivot that many expected would come with Manafort's hire never really happened. Trump would occasionally pay lip service to the need to unite the party and, yes, would read a speech off a teleprompter from time to time. But, his heart was never in it — and he was terrible about hiding that fact. As the months passed following Manafort's hire and Trump watched his once-beloved poll numbers falter, it became increasingly clear that he was fed up with all of the talk about the need to turn over a new leaf or do anything fundamentally different than he had done while winning the Republican nomination.
"I am who I am," Trump said. "I've gotten here in a landslide and we'll see what happens."
What that quote — and the subsequent staff moves — should tell you is that Trump thinks he made a mistake in bowing to establishment pressure and bringing in a veteran hand like Manafort to oversee things. Trump sees his current problems in the race as deriving not from being too much of himself but from not being enough of himself.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/17/donald-trump-is-going-back-to-being-donald-trump-thats-a-big-problem-for-republicans/
