Republican presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump on Monday fired his controversial campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. “The Donald J Trump Campaign for President, which has set a historic record in the Republican Primary having received almost 14 million votes, has on Monday announced that Corey Lewandowski will no longer be working with the campaign,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in a statement to The New York Times.
“The campaign is grateful to Corey for his hard work and dedication and we wish him the best in the future,” Hicks said. According to the top US daily, Lewandowski was seen as someone having hostile relationship with members of the national press.
“Lewandowski was often at odds with Trump’s chief strategist, Paul Manafort, who was brought on in March when the candidate seemed poised for a lengthy fight over delegates,” the daily said, adding that he was said to have resisted certain moves that would have increased the staff, at times blocking Manafort from making hires or later undoing them. In an interview to Foxx News, Barry Bennett, a senior Trump adviser, said, “Paul is totally in charge” of the campaign now that Lewandowski is gone.
Trump now claims he never suggested arming club-goers
Republican Donald Trump on Monday claimed that he never suggested club-goers attacked in the Orlando massacre should have been armed.
Trump said on Twitter that when he said “if, within the Orlando club, you had some people with guns, I was obviously talking about additional guards or employees.” But Trump was not so obviously talking about guards or employees. The presumptive GOP nominee has repeatedly suggested in the days since the attack that had the victims been armed, things would have gone differently.
“It’s too bad that some of the young people that were killed over the weekend didn’t have guns, you know, attached to their hips, frankly, and, you know, where bullets could have flown in the opposite direction,” he told conservative radio host Howie Carr the day after the attack.
“It would have been a much different deal,” he continued. “I mean, it sounded like there were no guns. They had a security guard. Other than that there were no guns in the room. Had people been able to fire back, it would have been a much different outcome.”