The re-hiring of former Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to help shore up a struggling re-election effort is being dismissed as not reflecting on the existing campaign managers, but there might be financial considerations in play.
On Thursday, an announcement that Lewandowski and several other veterans from the successful 2016 campaign were being brought back into the fold led to speculation that Trump co-campaign heads Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita might be on the way out.
According to Tara Palmeri, who posted on X on Thursday as the hiring was being announced, "Lewandowski told allies over the weekend that he was coming back as a campaign chairman essentially a layer above Wiles and LaCivita. This comes as Trump, superstitious and nostalgic, wants the team that helped him win in 2016 back."
Following up at Puck, Palmeri wrote that Wiles will likely survive, but LaCivita may be under the gun over the amount he has been billing for his services.
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As she explained, a source close to Lewandowski told her, "Susie is a survivor; she’s not going anywhere. But then you have LaCivita and Corey Lewandowski, two alpha men. It’s like Trump just wants them to kill each other and for one to win so he doesn’t have to actually fire anyone.”
She went on to add, that there is "chatter" around Mar-a-Lago about LaCivita and money.
"One obvious vulnerability facing LaCivita is his astronomical fee. As Trump stews over his fading poll numbers and whether a once easily winnable election is slipping away, there has been growing chatter in some corners of Mar-a-Lago about the $50,000 that LaCivita’s firm, Advanced Strategies, collects from the campaign and R.N.C. each month, which is included in the nearly $1.7 million he’s invoiced the campaign so far this year for various services like placed media, political strategy consulting, and video production, up from the $1.65 million he billed last year," she wrote.
Whether it is related to changes at the top of the campaign structure or the fact that Vice President Kamala Harris is riding a wave of enthusiasm and campaign contributions as she has surged past the former president in the polls, Palmeri wrote that LaCivita has undergone a mood change since the RNC convention in Milwaukee.
"The typically jovial LaCivita is now quiet and moody, I hear, a dramatic change from the heady days of the Republican National Convention, last month, when he was boasting about the size of his hotel suite," she reported.
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