Donald Trump has abruptly fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski (pictured), a short-tempered, grudge-bearing schemer reportedly blamed by the Trump family for the rackety state of their patriarch’s presidential campaign. Soon after the crewcut-haired former New Hampshire state police officer was escorted from campaign headquarters on June 20th, one of his former underlings gleefully tweeted out a snatch of “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead”, from “The Wizard of Oz”.
But in truth Mr Lewandowski did not bewitch anyone. Nor was he a tyrannical figure whose toppling will transform the Trump campaign, instantly, into a Technicolor land of dancing, liberated Munchkins. He was a ferocious loyalist, an over-promoted henchman-type whose avowed guiding principle was: “Let Trump be Trump”. Until now, that has been Mr Trump’s guiding principle, too—and therein lies Mr Lewandowski’s real significance. His sacking, now, will matter greatly if it means that the property tycoon has finally understood that the primary period of this election season is over, and with it the months of heady, screw-the-experts, instinct-led, state-by-state victories that saw Mr Trump grab the Republican presidential nomination from a field of senators, governors and party grandees. Mr Lewandowski’s firing matters if his former boss has finally been convinced by some brave soul or souls that the single person most likely to prevent the inauguration of President Donald Trump next January is Donald J. Trump, the ill-disciplined, thin-skinned narcissist-candidate.
Members of the politico-media village spent the day gripped by reports of the campaign manager’s downfall. Lots of Republican operatives and politicians more or less loathe reporters from mainstream news organisations. Mr Lewandowski took that loathing and acted on it, blacklisting journalists and whole news outlets from Trump rallies, and threatening to confiscate credentials from individual reporters on the spot if they tried to leave the special enclosures where they were kept penned at events. In March the campaign manager made news headlines of his own—usually a grave offence in politics, a trade which runs on such mottos as “Staff Ink Stinks”—after he was accused of manhandling a female reporter who tried to ask Mr Trump a question. He was charged with simple battery. Eventually prosecutors in Florida let the matter drop, but not before the release of security camera footage disproving Mr Lewandowski’s account of the incident.
Nor are journalists the only sensitive souls to be bruised by Mr Lewandowski’s manner. In a forensic post-firing interview by Dana Bash of CNN, it was put to the former campaign manager that he had offended big Republican donors and left the Trump fundraising machine trailing far behind that of Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee. There’s money “pouring in”, he replied vaguely. The ex-campaign manager was asked if it was true that he had been caught attempting to plant hostile stories in the press about Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s son-in-law. “I have no interest” in doing that, he said, and insisted that he had a fine relationship with Ivanka Trump, Mr Kushner’s wife and one of her father’s closest advisers. Mr Lewandowski batted aside reports that he had fought with the campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, a veteran political operative who has made no secret of his desire to make Mr Trump more “presidential” in tone and manner, as the campaign pivots from appealing to Republican primary voters, a small and impassioned slice of the electorate, to the general public.
Historians will not tarry long over such palace intrigues. What may linger from this day of sackings are Mr Lewandowski’s unvarying answers when asked why the campaign has had such a rough time of its since wrapping up the Republican nomination. He was asked about a string of decisions that have had Republican leaders smacking their foreheads in despair. He was invited to describe the decision-making process that led Mr Trump to claim that an Indiana-born federal judge is biased against him because he is of Mexican heritage. He was quizzed about to the candidate’s much-panned response to the Orlando mass shootings of June 12th (when Mr Trump suggested that Muslim-Americans are a disloyal fifth column and proposed banning immigration from a swathe of Middle Eastern countries). He was urged to explain why the Trump campaign still has ten times fewer staffers than the Clinton campaign, and has no plans to counter a torrent of television ads being lined up in battleground states by Mrs Clinton, by the Democratic Party and by political allies.
On each occasion, to simplify, Mr Lewandowski replied: but we won the primary, when nobody thought we would. When reminded that the general election is a very different contest, he would, in essence, revisit that primary win, mocking candidates who had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to no avail, such as Jeb Bush, the former g