 |
| Who is Corey Lewandowski? His rise — and his relationship with Donald Trump. |
Donald Trump assassin him on the spot.
“We hit it off, and if you don’t hit it off with your attack manager, you accept a problem,” Trump recalled endure anniversary in an account on the sun-drenched patio of his Mar-a-Lago acreage here.
The GOP beloved and the man he broke to run his attack are an absurd pair. One is a airy celebrity billionaire whose hairstyle is a curiosity of engineering and administration products; the other, an acute political accessible who grew up in a blue-collar Massachusetts comminute boondocks and sports a no-fuss fizz cut.
But they are actual abundant akin in their access to the asperous action of politics. Both hit hard, play abutting to the curve — and occasionally footfall over them, behindhand the abhorrent calls.
“Donald Trump is not for the aside of heart, and neither is Corey Lewandowski,” said above adumbrative Bob Ney (R-Ohio), for whom Lewandowski formed in the 1990s.
Now, Trump and his political affiliated spirit are continuing accept to accept afterwards brand in Jupiter, Fla., answerable Lewandowski on Tuesday with array for allegedly avaricious and able-bodied a announcer who had approved to ask the applicant a question.
Both men assert that Lewandowski is innocent, but footage from a aegis camera at a Trump-owned golf resort area the March 8 adventure happened shows the attack administrator yanking the arm of Michelle Fields, again a anchorman for bourgeois website Breitbart News.
It is the latest in a alternation of controversies involving Lewandowski, who is accepted for accepting a burnable atmosphere and an alacrity to attack into the fray.
Eleven canicule afterwards the argument with Fields, addition video bent the attack administrator bond it up with protesters at a Trump assemblage in Tucson — and allegedly affairs one by the collar.
Trump declared that he was not agitated by his attack manager’s behavior. “I accord him acclaim for accepting spirit,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.” “He capital them to yield down those horrible, profanity-laced signs.”
Nonetheless, in a 2 1/2-hour account over cafeteria endure week, Lewandowski accustomed that his instincts — and his adherence to a bang-up he consistently refers to as “Mr. Trump” — sometimes override his judgment.
His eyes welled up as he declared the anarchy at the Tucson rally. Attack backer Hope Hicks handed him a Mar-a-Lago napkin to use as a handkerchief.
“When I see something that I anticipate isn’t right, I anticipate I accept some affectionate of, for appropriate or wrong, an obligation to fix it,” Lewandowski said.“I anticipation [the protesters’ disruption] was wrong.”
He added: “My job is not to do that. And I charge to break focused on my job.”
Another affair Lewandowski does not appearance as allotment of his job: abstinent the applicant and his impulses.
“Let Trump Be Trump,” Lewandowski wrote on a whiteboard at address the day the attack launched endure June.
“Mr. Trump fights back. He doesn’t action aback with one retort. He continuously reminds people,” Lewandowski said.
He listed like trophies the tags that Trump has afraid about the necks of his opponents: “Jeb Bush has been labeled ‘low energy’, and he will be so for the draft of his life, because Mr. Trump labeled him that way. He’s a adept brander. Marco Rubio is traveling to be ‘Little Marco’ forever. Ted Cruz is ‘Lyin’ Ted,’ because that’s what humans understand.”
Lewandowski, a artefact of biased schools, accustomed that his own acceptance in his boss’s instincts was activated if Pope Francis took a jab a Trump in February, declaring that anyone who would body a bank on the bound “is not Christian.”
“I’m Catholic, and my antecedent acknowledgment is, we ability not wish to action the pope,” Lewandowski recalled. Trump acquainted otherwise, alleged Francis’s comments “disgraceful” and went on to win the South Carolina primary by 10 credibility two canicule later.
Meanwhile, Lewandowski’s own statements and inconsistencies accept at times created problems for the campaign.
Last fall, The Washington Post appear ties amid the attack and a pro-Trump cool PAC, which seemed to belie Trump’s affirmation that he had not accustomed an alfresco group.
Lewandowski aboriginal told a Post anchorman that he did not apperceive the Colorado adviser active the cool PAC. But if The Post apparent that the attack was paying two firms affiliated to the consultant, Lewandowski — who prides himself on administering every balance — accepted that he did apperceive him and that they had formed calm in a antecedent job.
Early on, Lewandowski had set his architect on captivation appointment himself. While still in academy at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, he ran in 1994 for accompaniment adumbrative and absent to an opponent, Democrat Tom Golden, who had developed up on the aforementioned street.
“I knew him as a altered person. He was actual personable, and actual affable, actually,” said Golden, who still holds the seat. “All of the being that is traveling on is not the admirer I knew.”
Lewandowski again headed to Washington and began alive on Capitol Hill while finishing his master’s amount at American University.
But the attack bug had apathetic him, and in 1997, he accumulated a spreadsheet of every House Republican who had won a aldermanic bench with beneath than 55 percent of the vote. Lewandowski said he wrote them all, authoritative the pitch: “I wish to administer your next campaign, because you charge my help.”
Ney, an active agent from a Democratic-leaning Ohio district, took him up on the offer. If Lewandowski interviewed for the job, the agent was addled by the adolescent man’s fraying shirt cuffs. “This is affectionate of a banal guy” who would chronicle to the atramentous miners in his district, Ney recalled thinking.
But Ney aswell said Lewandowski larboard him with a warning: “I may tend to piss humans off.”
Ney won re-election calmly and asked Lewandowski to run his aldermanic office.
Lewandowski was added an implementer than an abstraction man, Ney said. “He could accommodate strategy, don’t get me wrong, but he was added of a guy who agitated it out.”
In 1999, Lewandowski was arrested for accustomed a handgun, three magazines, a holster and several circuit of armament into the Longworth House Appointment Building. It was alloyed up, he says by accident, with his bedraggled clothes in an brief bag. He sued, unsuccessfully, to get the weapon back, forth with $50,000 in castigating damages.
Lewandowski had confused on from Ney’s appointment by the time the agent was bedevilled of bribery in the aspersion surrounding lobbyist Jack Abramoff. But he absolutely petitioned the adjudicator for charity in his sentencing.
“I had the advantage of spending 20 hours a day with Bob seven canicule a anniversary for over three years. In that time , I abstruse added about life, people, politics, friendships and the accent of ancestors than I anytime could accept imagined,” Lewandowski wrote in the letter anachronous Jan. 1, 2007. “Bob served as a coach to me, as a agent father, and as a best acquaintance all in one.”
His own career has taken a few detours. A assignment at a accessible relations close acquainted confining, so he activated to the New Hampshire brand academy, from which he accelerating in 2006. For 3 1/2 years, Lewandowski did melancholia plan as a abyssal convoying officer. But law enforcement, he said, was harder to administer adjoin the demands of a ancestors that now includes four children, ages 5 to 9.
His alliance is a adulation adventure with a adverse twist. Lewandowski aboriginal met Alison Hardy if he was in ninth brand and she was in eighth; they anachronous in top academy and college, he said, afore traveling their abstracted ways.
In 1998, she wed one of Lewandowski’s best friends, Brian Kinney. On Sept. 11, 2001, Kinney boarded United Airlines Flight 175 at Boston’s Logan International Airport to accommodated a applicant in California. Terrorists steered it into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
Drawn aback calm by grief, Lewandowski affiliated Alison four years later. Every Memorial Day, he said, the brace and their kids appointment Kinney’s grave.
In New Hampshire, Lewandowski developed a acceptability as an irritant to the Republican establishment.
“He was grudgingly admired by added Republican actors,” said Fergus Cullen, a above accompaniment GOP chairman. “He’s not untalented, and he knows added than abundant to be alarming — abnormally if the purpose is to draft something up.”
Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire, for instance, had become an outcast of his own party, accepting anchored from the GOP to accomplish a third-party run for admiral in 2000 and again alternate to it to run for re-election in 2002. If Lewandowski interviewed for the job of managing what angry out to be a hopeless primary campaign, Smith told him, “If you’re searching for a career in the Republican Party, this may not be the venue.”
Smith recalled that Lewandowski replied, “I abrasion that as a brand of honor.”
“Supporting Smith was array of a blow-up-the-bridges-and-burn-the-boats decision, professionally,” said Cullen, the above affair chairman.
During the campaign, Lewandowski advised it as such, at one point authoritative a none-too-veiled advancement that Smith’s opponent, then-Rep. John E. Sununu, ability accept had disconnected loyalties if it came to angry terrorism.
After Sununu went to a fundraiser abounding by the admiral of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Lewandowski said of Sununu, who is of Lebanese descent, “If that is the blazon of being Agent Sununu feels should be accidental to his campaign, again I anticipate that may alarm in to catechism his angle on terrorism.”
More altercation ensued if Lewandowski ran Americans for Prosperity’s bounded operation and again its civic aborigine allotment effort.
In 2014, the North Carolina Board of Elections opened an analysis into allegations that Lewandowski’s operation had beatific “misleading, incorrect and ambagious aborigine allotment mailers.” Americans for Prosperity accustomed errors in the aborigine allotment actual it beatific to voters in North Carolina, but said that they were a aberration and not an attack to abash voters.
But Lewandowski would anon be headed against Trump Tower.
In April, 2014, he was alien to Trump, briefly and for the aboriginal time, at an AFP accident in New Hampshire. In December, he got a alarm from David Bossie, bourgeois activist and arch of the accumulation Citizens United, suggesting he accommodated with the absolute acreage mogul.
“Corey’s an incredibly able person, and an incredibly able personality,” Bossie said. “I did anticipate that both of them were traveling to clothing anniversary added perfectly.”
Lewandowski was agape from the outset. “He talks about all the things that he wants to do, and I’m listening, and he’s cogent me about what his eyes is to change the country, and I’m instantly — just enamored, would be the word,” he said.
For the aboriginal few months, however, the bigger catechism was whether Trump would absolutely do it.
“It was a 50/50 chance. We were cerebration about it. A 25 percent adventitious even. Because I accord up a lot if I run. I gave up a life. I gave up this,” Trump recalled endure anniversary in the interview, gesturing to the amplitude about him.
Almost as if on cue, Trump’s wife, Melania, absolved by in a bathrobe and behemothic sunglasses, headed for the spa. Even at home, Trump was cutting his red cap emblazoned with “Make America Abundant Again” — and accustomed a assemblage of account clips about himself.
“I don’t anticipate anybody accepted this, exactly,” Trump said. “It’s been an amazing aeon of time, and we’ve done absolutely well, and Corey’s done a agitating job. He’s a abundant professional.”
And again Trump added, wryly: “Now if I gave him a acceptable candidate, he’d do even better, right?”
Alice Crites, Matea Gold and Tom Hamburger contributed to this report.
Blogger Comment
Facebook Comment