Two months after he swept into the 2024 campaign as a senior adviser and suggested he would be taking it over, Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s onetime 2016 campaign chief, has lost that power struggle and been told to focus on being a surrogate, according to people familiar with the matter.
The reassignment may sting for Lewandowski, who technically returned to Trump’s orbit in a leadership role in the summer but quickly made enemies over his suggestion he would mount a power play and questions about whether the campaign mismanaged funds, the people said.
Trump had wanted Lewandowski by his side through the summer until he soured on his antics in recent weeks, they said. Lewandowski has been told to focus on surrogate work and see what he can do about flipping New Hampshire, which Trump came close to carrying in 2016.
Unless the campaign hits more snags that give Lewandowski an opening to play a larger role, the wariness towards him from the wider leadership team loyal to Trump’s campaign chiefs Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita could mean he has diminished influence for the remainder of the cycle.
“He blew himself up,” a Trump official said of Lewandowski. “The entire staff has been working together for two years. You think you’re going to come in at the end and throw your weight around? A bit misguided.”
But Trump does not appear to have fully exiled Lewandowski – a trusted political aide he has turned to in crunch moments, including this summer as he fielded calls from allies urging him to shake up his leadership during the turbulent period when Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee.
Lewandowski was back traveling on Trump’s private plane on Saturday to the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, even if critics say it was an anomaly, and it remains far from clear whether the banishment is permanent given his staying power despite previous transgressions.
In 2016, Lewandowski was unceremoniously fired as campaign chief after he repeatedly clashed with Trump’s children, only to return in 2021 to run a pro-Trump Super Pac until he was ousted from that, too, over unwanted sexual advances towards a female donor.
At the time, aides insisted that his tenure was over – only to be proven wrong when Lewandowski was hired earlier this year as an adviser to the Republican national convention, and triumphantly returned to the Trump campaign in a leadership role months later.
“He’s Trump’s comfort blanket,” observed one Trump ally who has been around since the 2016 era. “And he’s like a cockroach. He never dies.”
In a statement, Lewandowski said: “I’m proud to volunteer my time to do everything possible to help Donald J Trump win this election and Make America Great Again.”
Still, he has engendered little sympathy from people in Trump world, who broadly see Lewandowski’s situation as largely of his own making and have been more preoccupied with tracking polls in key swing states that they think indicate Trump will win in November.
They point out that Trump was trailing by double digits when he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 and narrowly lost to Joe Biden in 2020. They point to their ground game strategy of targeting low propensity voters, although the Guardian has reported the scope remains questionable.
And they note that the news cycle in recent weeks has moved so quickly that even deathly negative headlines that might have sunk any other candidate – for instance, about his debate performance – have not materially moved the needle against Trump.
Lewandowski’s purported sins this time around, also reported by the newsletter Puck, have been described as principally twofold: ginning up a power struggle against Trump’s campaign chiefs without allies to pull it off, and launching a secret audit into the campaign’s finances motivated in part by his distrust of LaCivita.
“Corey was trying to kamikaze into Chris,” the Trump ally said dryly.
He returned to Trump’s orbit as an unpaid senior adviser in August, when the campaign added a number of staffers to the leadership team as it sought to regain momentum after Biden dropped out and Harris rode a wave of Democratic enthusiasm to take over the ticket.
In advance of the move, Lewandowski suggested to allies that Trump had asked him to come back to “run the campaign” – which was not true, and aides were quick to complain that Trump had actually told his team “let’s find something for Corey to do”, the people said.
The trouble for Lewandowski was that he came onboard a leadership team that had been hired by, and for two years worked closely with, Wiles and LaCivita. Arriving at the end of the campaign and suggesting he might take it over raised hackles, the people said.
With that entrance, internally the Trump campaign worried for weeks that any disagreements between Lewandowski and LaCivita, in particular – the two were described as alpha males who do not care for each other – could cause a distracting blow-up.
Lewandowski ultimately installed himself in a ‘“flex office” in the Trump campaign’s headquarters in Palm Beach, Florida, where he started work on an audit of the campaign’s spending and operations, one of the people said.
The audit raised questions about roughly $80m of campaign money that went on television advertising actually went to commissions through a company co-managed by LaCivita, the person said. But Trump has not seen the audit and it remains unclear what exactly Lewandowski found, another person said.
