Why Not the Best?

What, exactly, does Manafort do for Trump? His official title is “convention manager,” says campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. “The primary focus of the campaign has been, one, running and winning elections. And that’s my job,” Lewandowski told me recently. “And ensuring we amass 1,237 delegates or more to secure the nomination at the convention. And that’s Paul’s job.”

Washington Republican operatives who know him say that Manafort’s real job is to professionalize the Trump campaign, and they all agree on his abilities. He got his start at the 1976 Republican National Convention as a 27-year-old floor manager for Gerald Ford, holding the president’s delegates against the insurgent campaign of Ronald Reagan. After stints in the 1980 Reagan campaign, the Republican National Committee, and the Reagan White House, Manafort helped direct the 1984 Republican convention. That’s where Scott Reed met the man he calls “the ultimate delegate wrangler” and a “convention expert.”

“I first saw Manafort’s skills as we all made that a made-for-TV convention,” says Reed, the current senior political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Jeff Bell, the veteran Republican strategist who worked for Reagan’s campaign at the 1976 convention, says Manafort brings the Trump campaign “organizational muscle” and a skill for managing complicated systems. “Running a convention is like piloting a very complex ocean liner,” Bell says. “That’s a skill that Paul has.”

“He is one of the best pure tacticians I’ve ever worked with,” Bell adds.

All of Washington also agrees on what Manafort’s addition to the team means: The Trump campaign is getting a makeover. Hailed as a master of delegate and convention strategy, Manafort was initially brought in to help the campaign survive—or, better yet, avoid—a contested convention. Even though Trump has now effectively secured the nomination, it’s unlikely Manafort’s role will be reduced, at least not without an internal campaign fight.

He’s not known to play second fiddle. Reed ran Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign and hired Manafort as a senior adviser. He says Manafort’s nickname around the office was the Count: “He’d come in with everything but a cape,” Reed says. “He liked to be in charge.”

“In charge” is exactly what Manafort appeared to be shortly after his hiring in late March. It wasn’t just appearing on the Sunday shows. Manafort also began asserting a more active role in shaping the direction of the campaign and the candidate. Manafort was “gaining influence” and “consolidating his own power,” said Politico, while Lewandowski was “losing the tug-of-war” and “has been neutered.” New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman reported Manafort had “taken over” the campaign.

At a private meeting between Manafort and members of the Republican National Committee in April, he assured those gathered that Trump was “projecting an image” in public but would tone down the rhetoric in the coming weeks and months: “The part that he’s been playing is evolving into the part that now you’ve been expecting, but he wasn’t ready for, because he had first to complete the first phase. The negatives will come down,” Manafort said, according to audio of the meeting obtained by the Associated Press. “The image is going to change.” And Manafort suggested he was the one implementing the change.

But he may have gotten ahead of himself. Days after the RNC meeting, Trump was back to his old, familiar self, referring to “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz as a “pain in the ass” and calling John Kasich a “slob” who is “disgusting” when he eats. Trump also dismissed the idea that he would be changing anything about his style: “If I acted presidential,” he said at an April rally, “I can guarantee you this morning, I wouldn’t be here.”

And so, two weeks after its article proclaiming Manafort’s new influence within the campaign, Politico reported that Trump was “frustrated with Manafort” and was shifting “some power back” to Lewandowski.

Lewandowski says reports of internal campaign strife are bogus. “This was a narrative that the media wanted,” he told me.

But what about Manafort’s claim that Trump would be changing his image?

“This campaign has been run on four words: Let Trump be Trump,” Lewandowski says. “Mr. Trump was very clear about what he thought about [Manafort’s claim].”

If Manafort is already on the outs with his new boss, it may not be just an issue of him getting out over his skis. Rumors have circulated suggesting Trump is “bothered” by Manafort’s long career representing dictators and thugs. A report in the Daily Beast called a group of clients represented by Manafort’s firm in the early 1990s “the torturer’s lobby.”

Since the late 1980s, Manafort has lobbied Congress on behalf of plenty of unsavory international clients: There was everyone from Mobutu Sese Seko of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines to the anti-Marxist guerilla leader Jonas Savimbi in Angola and a number of other African despots and warlords. In the last decade, Manafort has also consulted for European strongmen like Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.

As Franklin Foer at Slate recently wrote, Manafort was instrumental in remaking Yanukovych’s image into that of a pragmatic businessman who could bring order to a divided country (sound familiar?) ahead of Ukraine’s 2010 election.

Some of what Manafort taught Yanukovych could be applicable in the months to come. “He instructed him to refrain from speaking off the cuff,” Foer wrote. “He taught him how to display a modicum of empathy when listening to the stories of voters.”

Less innocently, Manafort encouraged candidate Yanukovych to stoke the underlying tensions within Ukraine by blasting the incumbent government’s cooperation with NATO and by repeating trumped up stories of the nation’s Russian speakers being abused. It may have helped Yanukovych win the election, but it also helped tear the country apart.

Manafort’s firm, Davis Manafort, had worked on behalf of Yanukovych’s political benefactor, Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, since around 2005. Akhmetov, like Yanukovych, is an ally of, if not a proxy for, Russian president Vladimir Putin.

For his part, Manafort maintains the work was nothing more than routine international political consulting. “The role that I played in that administration was to help bring Ukraine into Europe, and we did,” Manafort told Fox News Sunday last month. That’s a curious claim, since Yanukovych’s election—engineered in large part by Manafort—meant plans for Ukraine to join NATO were scrapped. Without the rise and fall of Yanukovych, Crimea might not have fallen into Putin’s hands.

Manafort declined to be interviewed on the record. But I did ask his colleague and rival on the campaign, Corey Lewandowski, about Manafort’s list of less-than-savory former clients. Was Lewandowski concerned about how it might reflect on Trump and the Republican party?

“I haven’t followed Paul’s career,” says Lewandowski, adding they had never met before Manafort joined the campaign. “I don’t know what Paul’s previous work was. I’ve never asked him about it.”

Removed from much of the business of American politics for more than a decade, Manafort has a ticket back to the Big Show with Trump’s campaign. But why would he want it? An American presidential campaign is less lucrative than international consulting work. Manafort might have retired quietly to his condo in Trump Tower (where he first got to know his new boss). His colleagues suggest he’d be the first to say he’s not particularly interested in issues or ideology.

So why do it? “He loves the game,” Jeff Bell says. “He thinks he’s the best in the business.”

And Donald Trump, as we know, only hires the very best.

Michael Warren is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard