Paul Manafort was reportedly subject to “the look” from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump a few times prior to his resignation from the campaign Friday.
“Manafort had been getting ‘the look’ from Trump, i.e. Trump wasn’t accepting his advice anymore,” reports Bloomberg reporter Kevin Cirilli, drawing on campaign sources.
Trump hired Breitbart executive Steve Bannon as campaign CEO Wednesday following a week of bad poll numbers and negative press, including two damning reports on Manafort’s work in Ukraine for a pro-Russian governing party. The campaign initially framed the move as an expansion of the team rather than a demotion of Manafort, but he resigned as campaign chairman Friday.
“Paul is a true professional and I wish him the greatest success,” Trump said in a statement Friday portraying the resignation as amicable. But Cirilli reports: “Staff, surrogates, stunned.”
“Manafort world saying this wasn’t about ANY internal beef,” he tweeted, indicating pushback against the idea Trump was dissatisfied with Manafort’s work. “He was concerned his previous consulting work would be a distraction for Trump.”
The New York Times reported Sunday Manafort’s name is on a secret Ukrainian ledger in which he is designated to receive $12.5 million in cash for his work, and the Associated Press followed that up Wednesday with another revelation that he helped secretly funnel millions of dollars from political operatives in Ukraine to Washington lobbyists in an effort to influence U.S. policy.
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