A former consultant for Donald Trump says the candidate’s never-ending stream of contentious run-ins with reporters and anchors is unbecoming of a serious campaign.
“That’s what happens when you have people who are inexperienced at politics at this level running the campaign,” Roger Stone said Wednesday in an interview with the Washington Examiner media desk. “Your campaign cannot be reactive. It has to be proactive in a number of mechanical ways,” Stone said. He said national campaigns have to be about “big-picture issues.”
Stone says he resigned from Trump’s campaign last weekend, though Trump says Stone was fired.
Stone specifically referred to Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, as a problem. Lewandowski has been active in Republican politics and most recently served as the New Hampshire state director for the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity.
But Stone said in a recent TV interview that his vision for the campaign didn’t align with Lewandowski’s. He said that he once went to talk logistics with Lewandowski only to find out that the campaign’s top boss was out having coffee with ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos.
“The manager is supposed to be working on the mechanics,” Stone told the Examiner. “Getting on the ballot in 50 states is a really difficult process. This takes an enormous amount of planning, staffing and foresight. You need to coordinate in the 50 states.”
Lewandowski declined to directly address Stone’s criticism.
“I don’t respond to fired employees who don’t have any understanding of what happens within the internal structure of the campaign,” he said.
When Trump and Stone parted ways, the Trump campaign said it was because Stone, who worked in the Nixon administration and is known now within media circles as a flamboyant GOP operative, had tried gaining attention for himself instead of the candidate.
Even though Stone has been on a media blitz in the last several days, commenting on Trump and the 2016 race, he rebutted the idea that he needed Trump to get attention for himself.
“I want you to do a Google search under ‘Roger Stone’,” he said. “It’s an absurdity. I’ve been profiled in the New Yorker, profiled in the Weekly Standard. Look at the coverage I got for my last book. I don’t need Donald Trump to get publicity.”
Asked what role he plans on taking in the 2016 race for the White House now that he’s unaffiliated with any campaign, Stone said he has two books coming out in the coming months: One is critical of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the other is an attack on GOP candidate Jeb Bush.
Stone said that specific policy proposals are lacking from the Trump campaign, but that he has seen a change of late and that the candidate seems to be pivoting into more substantive issues rather than media fights.
“I know he has policy positions,” Stone said. “I’ve seen them. I’ve worked on them.
Stone said that he is still a supporter of Trump’s and believes that he could win the GOP nomination.
