One of Donald Trump’s newest hires deleted a series of tweets blasting his new boss as “#SleazyDonald,” highlighting the sharp turn many Republicans who are now supporting or working with Trump have had to make.
The Trump campaign touted Jason Miller’s hiring in an email sent Tuesday, but when Miller was a top aide for the Texas senator — and top Trump primary opponent — Ted Cruz, he was blasting away at Trump online. Miller called him “#SleazyDonald” in a series of five tweets sent in the heat of the Republican primary.
“Unbelievable watching this Trumpbot on @cnn tell Cruz to be classy. Um, Trump described his avoiding VD’s as his own Vietnam. #SleazyDonald,” Miller wrote in a May 3 tweet, sent just eight hours before Cruz ended his White House bid.
But the tweets — found in a Google search of Twitter — were deleted by Tuesday afternoon.
A call to Miller was not immediately returned Tuesday afternoon.
Miller, a veteran of many insurgent campaigns and Republican primaries, including the failed 2012 Indiana senate bid Richard Mourdock, is the most senior member of Cruz’s inner circle to jump over to Trump’s — several other top aides to Cruz, and the Texas senator himself, have not yet even said they will back him.
“Donald’s gonna Donald … you look at the results from tonight, I think you’d look and say that a lot of folks are being turned off by that,” Miller told reporters after his then-boss Cruz beat Trump in the Wisconsin primary in April.
“You see the way Donald Trump continues to lash out, that’s just a pattern for Donald Trump. When things don’t go his way, he acts out and he calls names and I’m sure he’s on Twitter as we speak,” he had said.
Hard turns are hardly new in the world of political consulting. But they are rare.
One stark example of a sudden flips include Howard Wolfson — the former New York Democratic operative who flipped to supporting Michael Bloomberg in 2009.
“Michael Bloomberg is an out-of-touch billionaire who can’t relate to the problems of ordinary New Yorkers,” Wolfson wrote of Bloomberg in 2005, when he was working to oust him, according to The New York Times.
Miller’s hiring fills a glaring hole in the Trump campaign.
The campaign’s communications shop has numbered one for the entire race: Hope Hicks, a political neophyte who became the presumptive GOP nominee’s press secretary. Trump has generated an unprecedented amount of media attention, and has largely preferred to interact with the media himself rather than work through aides.
In an interview with CNN earlier this month, Trump said he would be adding more communications staffers “soon,” to support and supplement Hicks, but he didn’t provide a time frame.
Trump and his aides have been predicting P.R. reinforcements for months with little to show for it until now.
