Hillary Clinton has sought to pooh-pooh Donald Trump’s campaign shake-up with just about 80 days to D-Day, commenting that her Republican rival will be the same irresponsible and insulting person.
“I think it’s fair to say that Donald Trump has shown us who he is. He can hire and fire anybody he wants from his campaign. They can make him read new words from a teleprompter, but he is still the same man who insults Gold Star families, demeans women, mocks people with disabilities, and thinks he knows more about ISIS than our generals,” Clinton said on Wednesday soon after Trump named conservative firebrand Steve Bannon as his new campaign CEO.
“There is no new Donald Trump — this is it…I hope you will talk to any of your friends who are flirting with the idea of voting for Donald Trump. Friends don’t let friends vote for Trump,” she remarked at a campaign event in Cleveland. “Trump boasts the support of some of the most extreme voices in politics. Now one of them runs his campaign,” she tweeted later.
Trump himself has signalled in an interview that he is going to be his usual self and not quite attempting to project any new persona. If anything, he could well be dialling back to the “bare-knuckle” Trump seen during the Republican primaries instead of the ones some campaign aides tried in vain to transform him into over the past two months — someone more serious and presidential.
Bannon, the new CEO, has been various described as a conservative firebrand, a streetfighter an attack dog against the Clintons and someone projected by Bloomberg magazine as “the most dangerous political operative in America”.
At Breitbart News, the online conservative journal that he has headed, Bannon has run series of stories against the Clintons — ranging from theories about Clinton’s health to Bill Clinton’s alleged treatment of women.
“I think we’re going to sharpen the message. We’re going to make sure Donald Trump is comfortable about being in his own skin, that he doesn’t lose that authenticity that you simply can’t buy and a pollster can’t give you,” Trump’s new campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told CNN on Thursday.