What Lewandowski’s return means for the Trump campaign
Corey Lewandowski is back in the headlines after the 2016 campaign manager was tapped as the 2024 campaign chairman Thursday in a move that puts the hard-charging politico a rung above senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles.
The move has been brewing for some time. The Trump family had expressed growing frustration with the slow response to the Democrats’ bait-and-switch candidate swap, and jealous, competing power centers within the mid-level ranks of the campaign have only added to the irritation.
With just over 80 days left until Election Day, as one Trump veteran put it, “it’s time to get to the races.”
LaCivita and Wiles still have their jobs and have voiced public approval for the new hires, but it’s hard to miss that the two veteran politicos promised an orderly operation — and thus far have not delivered.
While talks to bring Lewandowski were in motion this past weekend, they’ve quickly progressed toward action. The new chairman began making moves Thursday to reassemble the 2016 team, tapping original talent that had been boxed out or moved on in the hopes of recreating the team of old-school loyalists former President Donald Trump trusts and building out the campaign’s internal muscle.
Campaign shake-ups are not unusual on any level. Eight years later, it’s easy to forget how bare bones a campaign an insurgent Trump ran in 2016. His re-election effort was more professional, but when the campaign began to run out of money, campaign manager Brad Parscale was shown the door in July and Bill Stepien was brought in.
The ghosts of 2020 still haunt the Trump campaign, which over the past few months has worked to save money by outsourcing its ground game and a lot of its infrastructure to outside organizations and the Republican National Committee and has allowed super PACs to spend like sailors on advertising while holding its own war chest for the special candidate rates later in the race, when things get more expensive.
The campaign may have outsourced a bit too much for the family’s liking, however — or at least not shown the results they expected. It’s too early to tell where it’s all going, but the broader public is just starting to pay attention. With just over 80 days left until Election Day, as one Trump veteran put it, “it’s time to get to the races.”
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IN OTHER NEWS
The ballot-measure battle on how to say ‘aborting a child’
Abortion is back in the news (as if it ever left). The Supreme Court of Arizona ruled Wednesday that the state’s November ballot measure will include the term “unborn human beings” to describe the person abortion kills. The Wednesday decision overturned a Maricopa County Superior Court decision that had ruled this kind of honesty was somehow biased.
The decision has infuriated pro-abortion activists, who wanted the ballot to call babies “fetuses.” They say that’s impartial, because obscuring reality is a favorite — and essential — Democratic tactic for convincing Americans to support abortion any time after the first trimester.
It’s tempting to believe this tactic, backed by Arizona’s Republican legislature, might be the future of fighting radically pro-abortion ballot initiatives that have successfully passed even in red states while energizing Democratic voter turnout.
There are a couple of problems with this idea, however. First, you need a hard-core legislature, secretary of state, attorney general, etc., willing to push that fight. Then, you need a court willing to call out Democratic misinformation. That’s a hard combo in a lot of states, including those run by Republicans.
Montana’s Republican attorney general, for example, fought pro-abortion groups whose proposed ballot language was vague, essentially enshrining in the state constitution that abortion providers can decide when an unborn baby is viable and what constitutes a health risk to the mother. In April, the court rejected his rewrite.
Abortion is already legal in the state up to the time of viability, and on Wednesday, that same court overturned a Montana law that required parental assent for children to obtain abortions, citing privacy concerns the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down in relation to abortion in its
Dobbs decision. You see: Not all legislators, officials, or courts are up to the task.
Neither are all voters. In New York, it’s the Democrats who are currently fighting to put the word “abortion” and the phrase “LGBTQ” on the ballot, arguing that the state election commissioners’ Orwellian use of “gender expression” and “reproductive healthcare and autonomy” in the state’s Equal Rights Amendment didn’t let voters know what’s at stake.
“Compare this with what happened post-Dobbs in California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, and Ohio in 2022 and 2023,” the pro-abortion editorial board of the New York Daily News
wrote Thursday.
In each state, explicit abortion protections were approved by the public to be added to the state constitution with the word “abortion” or explicit abortion restrictions or limitations (again, with the word “abortion”) were rejected by the public. In every instance, the protections and the bans, the word “abortion” was used. And in every case, the pro-choice position prevailed, with constitutional protections approved in California, Michigan, and Ohio and constitutional bans rejected in Kansas and Kentucky.
It’s hard to see where it’s all going to shake out, but it’s becoming increasingly clear as Democrats battle to take advantage of Americans’ innate libertarian leanings with “pro-choice” ballot measures that the next front will be the war of words.
Blaze News: Arizona permitted to call potential victims of abortion initiative ‘unborn human babies’ in voter pamphlet
