Hillary Clinton said Wednesday Donald Trump’s staff shake-up wouldn’t do much to alter the course of his campaign.
” ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them,’ ” Clinton said, citing Maya Angelou at a rally here. “I think it’s fair to say that Donald Trump has shown us who he is.”
“He can hire and fire anybody he wants from his campaign, they can make him read new words from a teleprompter, but he is still the same man who insults Gold Star families, demeans woman, mocks people with disabilities and thinks he knows more about ISIS than our generals,” Clinton said to cheers from the audience.
She added: “There is no new Donald Trump, this is it. And you know, I hope you will talk to any of your friends who are flitting with the idea of voting for Donald Trump. Friends don’t let friends vote for Trump.”
Trump’s campaign underwent a major shake-up, it was reported Wednesday, bumping up senior adviser and pollster Kellyanne Conway to campaign manager and hiring Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News and a former investment banker. The moves appear to sideline campaign chairman Paul Manafort who previously had been heading campaign leadership.
Clinton’s campaign has been largely shake-up free. Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, has been in his job since the outset of the campaign, and the same is true for almost all of her campaign’s leadership.
Trump’s campaign overhaul comes as he tries to stem the tide of statewide and national polls that have shown Clinton with leads in many battleground states.
Bannon, a frequent adviser to Trump, is known for his brass-knuckled demeanor and his website’s sharp tone.
While Republicans close to Trump argued that the move was not a shake-up and that the campaign remained on course, top aides inside the Clinton campaign viewed the move as a departure from the more scripted Trump that many establishment Republicans were hoping to see in recent months.
“Donald Trump has decided to double down on his most small, nasty and divisive instincts by turning his campaign over to someone who is best known for running a so called news sites that peddles divisive, at times, racist, anti-Muslim, anti-semitic, conspiracy theories,” Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, said Wednesday.
Trump, Mook added, “has officially won the fight to let Trump be Trump.”