For months now, Donald Trump’s inner circle has been trying to sell us on the notion that they’re running a much tighter campaign this time around. And the media has run with it: “Trump’s 2024 campaign has been notable for its rigor: Top advisers have largely steered clear of the most controversial far-righters who surrounded Trump in the past,” says Axios in their latest story about the campaign, published Wednesday.
Except you can consider all of the Trump campaign’s self-praise rescinded. That sentence was dubiously wedged into an Axios piece premised on—wait for it—all of those far-right cranks scurrying right back into Donald’s inner circle.
Trump’s team is in talks to hire 2016 campaign advisers Paul Manafort and Corey Lewandowski, The Washington Post and The New York Times first reported.
Manafort spent two years in prison on a 7½-year sentence for bank and tax fraud before being freed because of the COVID pandemic.
Lewandowski, who was fired in 2016 as Trump’s first campaign manager, was removed from a pro-Trump PAC in 2021 after the wife of a major donor accused him of inappropriate behavior.
In addition to Mugshot and Creep, Axios notes that pardoned criminal Roger Stone has been haunting Mar-a-Lago, and election-conspiracy propagator Christina Bobb has been thrown onto the Republican National Committee payroll. (And that’s only a small portion of the far-right takeover that Trump’s team engineered at the RNC, with daughter-in-law Lara sharing a leadership role with yet another Trump-loyal conspiracy crank, Michael Whatley.)
Oh, but:
Trump wanted to hire far-right activist Laura Loomer, the [New York] Times reported. But co-campaign manager Susie Wiles objected, two people familiar with the episode told Axios.
Translation: Trump is definitely going to find a job somewhere for Laura Loomer, the internet-infamous white nationalist. Have fun with that, Susie.
In another sign that the supposedly finely tuned Trump campaign is well on its way to becoming one of Trump’s trademark train wrecks, we’ll turn now to a Semafor story about Trump’s increasingly vigorous embrace of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. For a year or two, it seemed that Trump’s handlers had convinced him that no matter what he personally thought about the matter, he could not publicly lavish praise on rioters who violently attacked police officers and attempted to capture lawmakers in order to overturn an American election.
But the campaign team’s plans have crumbled as well. Trump now regularly refers to imprisoned Jan. 6 rioters as “hostages” while promising to “free” or “pardon” them. Semafor notes this tidbit, which should explain Trump’s increasing fondness for the nation’s most patriotic seditionists:
Trump filmed a video for a fundraiser the Patriot Freedom Project hosted in December 2022, and Save America PAC donated $10,000 to the nonprofit. He hosted and spoke at another fundraiser for the group at Bedminster in June of 2023. The former president has since attended “semi-regular” January 6 events at both Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster, often popping in to chat with family members and reiterate his support for their cause, advocates said.
See, there you go. You can speculate, as Semafor does, that Trump began to identify with imprisoned seditionists only after the long arm of the law began to threaten him with prison time. You can probably chalk it up more to Trump’s narcissistic fondness for anyone willing to commit crimes on his behalf. But none of that much matters, compared to the fondness Trump has for anyone who shows up at one of his home-slash-clubs to spend money.
As for whether Trump means he’ll be freeing only low-level insurrectionist rioters or he is promising to free even the most violent ringleaders, he and his far-right allies are playing coy. There’s only one reason to play coy on that one, and we all know what it is.
At this point, then, it looks like we can safely do away with all those previous Trump campaign vows that this time around, they’d be keeping the batshit conspiracy theorists, the foreign-influence peddlers, the anti-democracy zealots, and the rest of the far-right clown show at arm’s length. Trump’s already canoodling with the convicted Manafort, the creepy Lewandowski, and Roger effing Stone; the only thing keeping Rudy Giuliani at bay for now is likely his own incessant pleas for money.
It’s going to be a clown show, yes, but it’s also going to be incredibly dangerous for the country. Trump has thrown his lot in with theocratic fascists, with seditionists, and most of all with those willing to bend laws as much as is necessary to cement far-right rule.
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