- Sep 13, 2002
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Trump MUST Be Desperate if Corey Lewandowski’s Back on the Team
DESPERATE TIMES…
The man who coined the mantra “let Trump be Trump” appears to be back in the former president’s good graces after years of exile.
Michael Daly
Special Correspondent
Updated Aug. 16, 2024 6:12AM EDT
He’s back.
Eight years after Corey Lewandowski was fired as Donald Trump’s campaign manager, the sexually transgressing creep has been rehired.
He returns as a “senior adviser” despite having thoroughly proved himself to be a liability.
Among other things, he mocked the handicapped by joking about a 10-year-old migrant child with Down syndrome who had been separated from her mother at the southern border and put in a cage.
“Womp, womp,” Lewandowski said on television in 2018 after being told of the little girl’s plight.
In 2021, Lewandowski seemed to make himself all the more unhirable when he was charged with sexually harassing the wife of a bigtime GOP donor at a Las Vegas charity event. The victim, Trashelle Odom, reported to authorities that Lewandowski touched her on the leg and buttocks against her wishes. He then stalked her through the venue while spewing lewd remarks and boasting of his supposed sexual prowess. He was charged with criminal sexual harassment but got a plea deal that included “impulse control training.”
“He will no longer be associated with Trump World,” a Trump spokesman declared at the time.
By then, Lewandowski’s impulses had reportedly led to affairs with at least two women who were major figures in conservative politics. He was and is married to the widow of a friend who was killed on 9/11.
But whatever his transgressions, Lewandowski had also formulated a guiding political mantra. He inscribed it on a whiteboard at Trump headquarters early in the 2016 campaign.
“Let Trump be Trump.”
Former President Donald Trump speaks with Corey Lewandowski at a campaign rally in 2023.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Trump came to see that principle as the key to his success against Hillary Clinton. He had been recorded saying that a star such as him can grab women by the whatever and he said that a TV anchor who displeased him had been bleeding from wherever, but he had still beaten Clinton. It seemed that he really could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose any votes, as he famously boasted.But with Joe Biden’s victory, it turned out Trump did not have as many votes to lose as he imagined and if he shot somebody, he would at least get indicted for it.
Trump still insists he won in 2020, citing bogus theories of widespread voter fraud. Much of his base believes this lie and a majority of other Republicans have been afraid to stand up to him.
He seemed to be cruising toward a relatively easy victory over the failing incumbent this November—but that suddenly changed when Biden dropped out of the race. Trump now faces Vice President Kamala Harris, and the former president suddenly looks like he might lose. His response has the markings of what psychologists call narcissistic collapse: the phenomenon that occurs when a narcissist’s grandiose sense of self feels threatened.
“My uncle is panicking,” Mary Trump, a psychologist as well as the former president’s niece, wrote in response to Harris’ ascension.
“He’s running against a strong Black woman—and a former prosecutor—who isn’t afraid to call him out or mock him. His whole campaign strategy was based around attacking Joe Biden—his age, his infirmity, his cognitive decline.”
She went on, “Now that he’s up against a much younger candidate with a history of prosecuting criminals like him, he’s painted himself into a corner. How do you escape from your own narrative about how bad it would be for the oldest candidate in the history of this country to win the election if that candidate is now you?”
And in an intolerable presage to the sudden possibility of defeat, Trump found himself eclipsed.
“Knowing him as I do, I can tell you that the thing that’s probably bothering Donald the most is that he’s not the biggest story in politics anymore… There are many, many reasons Donald should be worried about a Harris candidacy, but it’s the palpable excitement surrounding Harris since Biden announced he was stepping aside that should worry him the most.”
At a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday where Trump was supposed to deliver a speech about the economy, he diverted from that to complain to the crowd that Harris was on the cover of TIME magazine.
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“With an artist sketch,” he said. “They don’t use a picture, they use an artist sketch. I want to use that artist. I want to find that artist. I like it very much.”
He had begun to sound a little loopy. He caught himself.
“But we’re going to beat her,” he insisted.
One common response to narcissistic panic is an impulsive, heedless effort to regain a sense of being in control.
Trump seems to be doing just that by rehiring Lewandowski, the creep who formulated the calming mantra that, to win, Trump need only be Trump.