Donald Trump’s notoriously confrontational campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, has left the campaign. “Corey Lewandowski will no longer be working with the campaign,” spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in a statement. “The campaign is grateful to Corey for his hard work and dedication and we wish him the best in the future.”
Lewandowski had openly feuded with longtime Republican operative Paul Manafort, who was given the title of campaign chairman. But the departure of Lewandowski, best known for an alleged scuffle with Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields, comes at a time of unprecedented chaos in the Trump campaign.
In response to plummeting poll numbers, disorganization, and staffing shortfalls, the presumptive Republican nominee has been reaching out to donors for “emergency” contributions, according to The Washington Post. His support is currently lower than any candidate, Republican or Democrat, this point in the last three election cycles.
He’s also being outpaced in ad dollars spent in swing states—not difficult to accomplish, because Trump has spent precisely zero:
By this time in 2012, Mitt Romney’s campaign and his various super PACs had spent about $38 million on ads in battleground states.
Similarly, Trump’s on-the-ground campaign staff is only a fraction of the size of Clinton’s. “The campaign estimates it currently has about 30 paid staff on the ground across the country,” according to the Associated Press reads. Trump staffers have since insisted that the campaign has no plans to expand.
Trump has said before that he won’t spend heavily on advertising and organization, because the media essentially does it for him. In this way, the campaign has been largely experimental, and Lewandowski—with his unapologetically aggressive demeanor—was the embodiment of this new kind of presidential campaigning. Until today.
Lewandowski’s abrupt departure caught many Trump staffers by surprise:
But others could not conceal their glee at Lewandowki’s firing. Here’s Trump senior advisor and New York state campaign director Michael Caputo: