New York Magazine (Opinion)
By Gabriel Sherman
August 6, 2015
No
matter what happens when Donald Trump takes center stage at the
prime-time Republican debate tonight on Fox News, he can already claim
at least one victory: The 2016
GOP primary has been all about him. But while the Donald has defied
political gravity during the six short (and strange) weeks he’s been an
unlikely presidential front-runner, there are signs that the natural
laws of campaign physics apply even to him. It
turns out that, inside a campaign that's been built on attacking
seemingly anyone and everyone, the staff has now turned to attacking
each other.
At
Trump Tower, rival staff members are vying to exert control over the
campaign in a power struggle that's every bit as vitriolic as Trump
himself. The battle lines are
drawn between the longtime aides who have advised Trump for years and
the new hires who have joined the staff in recent months. Even his
daughter Ivanka has been caught up in it. According to sources with
knowledge of the campaign’s inner workings, the disputes
over daily strategy decisions are fierce — and personal. Left
unchecked, the dysfunction threatens to undermine a core message of the
Trump campaign: his management acumen.
All
presidential campaigns experience growing pains, of course — especially
insurgent ones. But for Trump the trouble is that his campaign has
barely grown. “Considering
they have a staff of, like, three people at headquarters, there’s a lot
of infighting,” one conservative who has been briefed on the situation
told me. The conflict between the old guard and the new began in January
when Trump hired a brash 40-year-old Republican
operative named Corey Lewandowski to serve as campaign manager. At the
time, Trump’s entire political staff consisted of his lawyer Michael
Cohen, veteran operative Roger Stone, and all-purpose aide Sam Nunberg.
Last
week, the factional differences spilled into public when the campaign
fired Nunberg after Business Insider published an article revealing
racist Facebook posts Nunberg
had written in 2007. According to a source, Nunberg and his allies
believed Lewandowski was involved in the leak as a pretext to force
Nunberg out of the campaign — an allegation Lewandowski adamantly
disputes. “I am denying 150 percent on my kids’ lives that
I had anything to do with it,” Lewandowski told me. Nunberg couldn’t be
reached for comment.
Whatever
the case, Nunberg's firing and the turmoil it's caused in Trumpworld
illustrates the difficulty Lewandowski has faced wresting control of the
campaign. For months,
according to a source, he'd been at odds with Nunberg. Not long after
becoming campaign manager, Lewandowski instructed Nunberg, who'd been a
Trump adviser for several years, to work from home instead of
headquarters, a source said. Nunberg felt further marginalized
when Lewandowski had him bumped off several campaign trips. The biggest
flashpoint, however, was Lewandowski's refusal to release detailed
policy papers Nunberg had written for Trump. “The campaign was getting
killed for having no substance, and Corey wouldn’t
release them,” a source close to the campaign explained.
Media
strategy has become another locus of internal disagreement. According
to a source close to the campaign, the old guard is frustrated that
Lewandoski and another
new hire, spokesperson Hope Hicks, seem to be favoring CNN over Fox
News. For example, on July 15, Fox News chairman Roger Ailes spoke with
Trump by phone and asked Trump to give Fox the exclusive on his $10
billion financial disclosure. Trump agreed and told
Ailes to send a courier to Trump Tower to pick it up. But, according to
the source, before Ailes’s courier could deliver the release back to
Fox, someone inside the Trump campaign sent it to CNN, thereby
subverting Fox’s exclusive. (For his part, Lewandowski
says Trump never told him to give Ailes an exclusive look at the
Federal Election Commission filing. “We provided everybody with a
one-page release at the same time,” Lewandowski told me.) Two weeks
later, CNN beat Fox again on another major scoop when it
obtained a campaign statement quoting Trump’s ex-wife Ivana denying
decades-old allegations aired in a Daily Beast article that she accused
Trump of raping her while they were married. "The campaign was
struggling to find her in Europe, they were bleeding
in the national media," a source explained. "And then they gave a
60-minute jump to CNN, who buried the story in the back of a package and
gave it short shrift. Again, Fox got this late."
Much
closer to home, Trump has also faced push-back from his daughter
Ivanka. According to three sources close to the campaign, Ivanka was
troubled by her father’s comments
that Mexican immigrants were rapists. “She’s close to her father and is
sensible enough to know a problematic situation,” a friend of Ivanka’s
told me. Her feeling, the friend added, was that her father was hurting
himself with his extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric.
At one point, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter,
Ivanka submitted several drafts of a statement for Donald to release to
walk back the quotes, but he refused to have them published. “Donald
didn’t like it,” a person close to him said. A
spokesperson for Ivanka declined to comment.
That
Trump has sustained his surge despite all this messiness is a testament
to his surprising political skills, his mastery of the media, or just
the sheer weirdness
of this year’s Republican primary cycle. Either way, the staff turmoil
shows no sign of abating. Yesterday, Lewandowski got embroiled in
another public feud when he fired an Arizona-based Trump operative for
publishing — you guessed it — racist posts on Facebook.
When I asked about all the chaos, Lewandowski maintains that Trump
wouldn’t be affected by staff disputes. “Maybe you can call it growing
pains," he said. "But we’re only six weeks into a campaign when no one
thought he was running and he is now the clear
front-runner for the Republican nomination for president of the United
States."
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