Major announcements about Donald Trump’s general election campaign personnel are coming this week, Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort said Sunday, arguing that the GOP candidate’s campaign is not trailing Hillary Clinton’s with respect to its effectiveness.
“Our campaign, frankly, is getting organized,” Manafort said on NBC’s Meet the Press, promising that the campaign would announce key personnel hires for the campaign at the national and state levels. The campaign is now fully integrated with the Republican National Committee and active in 16 states identified as battleground states in November, he explained.
“We are confident that we are not behind the Clinton campaign,” Manafort said. “They’re muscle-bound. We’re not.”
Trump has faced criticism that he is unprepared for the general election as his fundraising has badly lagged behind that of Clinton, and his staff is a small fraction of hers. The polls, meanwhile, have shown his support swooning in recent weeks.
Trump’s advantage, Manafort said, is that he “doesn’t need to figure out what’s going on in order to say what he wants to do.”
Manafort, a lobbyist and campaign adviser to past Republican candidates, also brushed off the Clinton campaign’s criticisms that Trump traveled to Scotland to boost his new Scottish golf course while world markets gyrated in response to the U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union.
Trump’s “success as an international businessman and a person who gets things done is one of the attractions of his candidacy,” Manafort argued.
In fact, he said, the popular discontent that drove British voters to leave the EU will also “be the basis for the election” in the U.S.
“Hillary Clinton is ignoring the reality because she is part of the establishment,” Manafort claimed. “She can’t get away from the fact that she is part of the problem that is being rejected.”
