AFP, New York :
Donald Trump shook up his campaign team for the second time in two months, fending off suggestions that his presidential run is in crisis as polls show Hillary Clinton cruising towards victory.
“There is no new Donald Trump. This is it,” Clinton told a rally in Ohio. “He is still the same man who insults Gold Star families, demeans women, mocks people with disabilities and thinks he knows more about ISIS than our generals.” Her campaign’s manager accused Bannon of presiding over a website that “peddles divisive, at times racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”
“We absolutely expect with this change for Donald Trump and the campaign as a whole to double down on more hateful, divisive rhetoric, more conspiracy theories, more wild accusations,” Robby Mook told reporters.
Clinton is leading Trump, 47.3 percent to 41.2 percent, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average. The Republican languishes behind her in virtually every key battleground state, raising the prospect of a Clinton landslide win.
Trump has been badly damaged since denigrating the parents of a Muslim American soldier killed in Iraq, members of the so-called Gold Star families who have lost a loved one in military service. He was accused last week of inciting violence against Clinton in a remark about the right to bear arms.
A string of prominent Republicans have announced they will not vote for Trump as US newspapers report of a campaign in crisis and staffers unnerved by a candidate apparently incapable of reeling in crass remarks.
While his media-saturated, populist, outsider campaign defeated 16 rivals to win the Republican nomination, Trump has refuted suggestions that he should change tack to win the November election from the center.
“Everybody talks about, ‘Oh well, you’re gonna pivot’… I don’t wanna pivot,” he told Wisconsin news station WKBT-TV. “I mean you have to be you. If you start pivoting, you’re not being honest with people.”
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s White House transition team, a mix of former advisers of President Barack Obama, close confidants, long-time colleagues and former elected officials, reflects the sense of careful organization the Democratic candidate has aimed to project in her presidential campaign.
But her Republican rival, Donald Trump, could seize on the group to make the point that she is part of the establishment he aims to defeat in November’s election, and to reiterate his charge that a Clinton administration would be an Obama “third term.”
The group, which the Clinton campaign named on Tuesday and which will lay the groundwork for her to take charge quickly if she wins, is evidence of Clinton’s long experience in Washington as a former secretary of state, U.S. senator and first lady.
Transition teams aim to help the president-elect make key decisions during the period between the election and the inauguration, in this case from Nov. 8 to Jan. 20, so the new White House occupant can fill leadership posts quickly.
“They are the names you would expect – people who have been advising her for a long time; people who have worked with her for a long time and people who are peers, who she respects,” Matt Bennett of the moderate Democratic group Third Way said of Clinton’s transition team.
