Campaign turnaround for Donald Trump?

OPINION:

Real estate tycoon Donald Trump, who has ignited a political fire storm in the Republican Party, has fired his presidential campaign manager, saying he will change his style for the general election.

At a meeting in his New York office on Monday, Mr. Trump fired Corey Lewandowski, his combative chief strategist, and had him escorted out of the Trump Tower.

It was Mr. Trump’s first acknowledgment that his campaign was encountering a sea of troubles that included an anti-Trump rebellion among delegates to next month’s national convention, an almost nonexistent general election ground game, and a war chest dangerously low on funding.

Mr. Lewandowski, who had never managed a presidential campaign before, was the mirror image of Mr. Trump’s rough, tough, brash style of campaigning. “Let Trump be Trump,” he said.

He had many enemies within the campaign who saw him as a mean, incompetent lightweight who didn’t know how to run a campaign, and encouraged Mr. Trump’s bluff and bluster insults.

The campaign needed a seasoned veteran to run the organization and Mr. Trump turned to longtime Republican lobbyist and operative Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman and senior strategist.

Mr. Manafort and Mr. Lewandowski were engaged in a bitter internal battle that had virtually paralyzed the campaign, and needed plans in preparation of the general election never got started.

Mr. Trump, who vowed that he was never going to change his campaign style, said on Monday that he had changed his mind.

“We’re going to go a little bit different route from this point forward. A little different style,” he told Fox News in an interview Monday night.

What that means at this stage of the campaign remains to be seen, but Mr. Manafort has his work cut out for him on several strategic fronts that Mr. Lewandowski ignored.

Fundraising figures were released Monday that showed Mr. Trump’s campaign had taken in just $3.1 million in May, but by June he had only $1.3 million on hand.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, collected $28 million in May and finished the month of June with $42 million in her campaign fund.

Then there’s Mr. Trump’s ego-driven, tin-ear messaging problems, focusing on himself and on his enemies, instead of the national issues that concern most Americans.

In a recent column, I pointed out that poll after poll has shown that the weakening economy, jobs and incomes were at or near the top of voters’ list of problems that need fixing. These are the issues Mr. Trump should be pounding day after day, placing full responsibility for them squarely on President Obama and Mrs. Clinton, who says she’ll continue the failed Obama economic policies.

Instead, Mr. Trump was bashing the judge presiding over two lawsuits brought against Trump University, saying he couldn’t get a fair hearing because the judge was Mexican, though a U.S. citizen. That led to weeks of controversy and charges that Mr. Trump was a racist.

Then, in the wake of the Orlando terrorist attack came still more demagoguery about banning Muslims from entering the U.S. from areas of the world where terrorism is rampant, and a new suggestion that we should begin to have religious “profiling” on American Muslims, too.

In a private strategy meeting following Mr. Lewandowski’s ouster, Mr. Trump and his team of senior advisers discussed the issues that needed to be the focus of his campaign in key battleground states after the convention.

And, brace yourself, apparently his team pressed him to focus first and foremost on the weakening Obama economy.

Indeed, Mr. Trump and his top advisers were said to have “crafted a message tightly tailored to the economy,” The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

But there are those who believe his campaign shake-up is too little and too late, and that he faces bigger troubles ahead — namely, the Republican convention, where hundreds of delegates are plotting to prevent his nomination.

It is being widely reported that nearly 400 delegates to the party’s gathering in Cleveland next month are reaching out to like-minded delegates to approve a change in party rules.

That change would free delegates presumably bound by the nominating results of the primaries and caucuses, allowing them to vote for whomever they wish according to the dictates of their conscience.

Leaders of this movement have been compiling a list of all of the party’s delegates, establishing a website, and holding a strategy conference call that they said drew as many as 1,000 participants.

Mr. Trump has called the insurgency “totally illegal,” arguing the delegates he won in the primary and caucus contests were bound to him — an assertion that is debatable.

To some extent, House Speaker Paul Ryan, who will be the convention chairman in control of the proceedings, has given the anti-Trump plot a green light.

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet The Press” Sunday, Mr. Ryan said, “It is not my job to tell delegates what to do, what not to do, or to weigh in on things like that. They write the rules. They make their decisions.”

It’s highly unlikely the Republican rebellion will succeed, but it could seriously weaken Republican voter turnout in November, and put Hillary Clinton in the White House.

• Donald Lambro is a syndicated columnist and contributor to The Washington Times.