Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, continued to dominate the news cycle, this time with two stories that push his lethal envelope ever closer to the edge. Monday it was reported that Trump had fired Corey Lewandowski, his campaign manager. This action followed his call for the use of racial profiling as a preventive gambit against terrorism.
As the GOP prepares for its convention next month in Cleveland, Trump seems to find fresh ways to narrow his chances of winning a general election against Hillary Clinton. Last week, a CNN poll showed that he trailed Clinton by double digits among likely voters.
Lewandowski, whose grab of a reporter in April after a Trump speech was the source of much media coverage, appeared on CNN Monday afternoon and said he had no idea why he had been fired. “But I would not trade anything for my time with him,” Lewandowski said.
The firing occurred in a “direct conversation” between the two old friends. Lewandowski had been with the campaign since its inception and will be replaced by Paul Manafort, Trump’s top strategist.
With Lewandowki made to fall on the sword and blamed for the campaign’s dismal numbers, it will have no impact on the tone of the campaign, according to a recent CNN poll in which more than 90 percent believed no change would occur.
Placing Manafort in charge is no more than replacing a director with the man who was supplying most of the plans. Suddenly, the architect is the builder, the field marshal on the ramparts, and it’s inconceivable that any campaign change will stop Trump from saying whatever he wants to say, so long as his base, the millions of voters he corralled, stays in place.
It’s to be seen how Trump’s plan to step up racial profiling will register with his constituents, although it’s hard to believe he could be any more outrageous.
“I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” he explained on Face the Nation. “Other countries do it, you look at Israel and you look at others, they do it and they do it successfully. And I hate the concept of profiling but we have to start using common sense and we have to use our heads.”
Another part of Trump’s way of “using your heads,” is to make guns more available to citizens. He said that if people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. where there were 49 fatalities, had been armed, “It would have been a different outcome.” He said,“Boom, boom, would have been the response.”
As has been the case since the very start of his campaign, Trump has been a wild card, a man of loose talk and unfiltered insult, which has only sullied the body politic and not disturbed the 13 million people who have voted for him.
His victories have given the GOP a major quandary. How do they deal with a candidate they can’t control, who plays by his own set of rules? Ways and means to derail him without ripping the GOP apart have baffled party leaders. To be sure, some of the disruption—the firing of Lewandowski and Trump’s call for more racial profiling—has obviously soured his campaign and is the real source of the increasingly poor poll numbers he’s receiving.
Since Sen. Bernie Sanders has yet to endorse Clinton, Trump’s weekly pomposity and vitriol are welcomed by the Democratic National Committee, as well as Clinton’s campaign.