The Donald's Top Lobbyist Assures the RNC That Trump's 'Dirtbag Don' Persona Is All an Act

After railing against Washington lobbyists for months, Donald Trump recently hired one of the worst of the breed to run his campaign. Paul Manafort, a former partner in the D.C. powerhouse lobbying firm, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly and now a principal at Davis, Manafort, has a client list that, according to right-leaning Politico, has been described as “the torturers’ lobby.” Manafort’s clients have included Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos; Mobutu Sese Seko, the longtime military dictator of Zaire; Angolan guerrilla Jonas Savimbi; the I.S.I., an alleged front group for Pakistani intelligence; and Ukrainian strongman and Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych.

But in his first major outing representing the Donald, uber-lobbyist Manafort committed the ultimate D.C. insider gaffe — he got caught on tape revealing that his client’s Dirtbag Don persona is all an act intended to fool rubes in the GOP base into supporting him.

NBC News obtained a recording of Manafort’s remarks when he addressed members of the Republican National Committee in Florida on Wednesday. In part, here is what he said:

MANAFORT: When [Trump is] sitting in a room, he’s talking business, he’s talking politics in a private room, it’s a different persona. When he’s out on the stage, when he’s talking about the kinds of things he’s talking about on the stump, he’s projecting an image that’s for that purpose. That’s what is important for you to understand: That he gets it, and that the part he’s been playing is evolving into the part that now you’ve been expecting, but he wasn’t ready for because he had to first feed the first phase. The negatives are going to come down, but Clinton is still going to be crooked Hillary. (Applause.)

It will undoubtedly come as a surprise to Trump’s supporters that the Donald is really just a typical politician, that his fascistic speeches about building a wall on the Mexican border, deporting 11 million undocumented residents and bombing the shit out of ISIS, along with his mockery of women, the disabled and prisoners of war, and all the rest — all of it was just lies designed to trick them into voting for him.

On the other hand, none of this will be a surprise to the 64 percent of Americans who hold an unfavorable view of Donald Trump.

Here’s the complete audio recording:

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The Donald’s Top Lobbyist Assures the RNC That Trump’s ‘Dirtbag Don’ Persona Is All an Act

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Poetic Justice

Verbatim

“Well, if you’re a white male Christian cisgender macho MAGA man, you can be as dumb as a rock and be deemed qualified to serve as secretary of Defense. That’s apparently what we’ve learned from this episode.”

— Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice bucked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s intelligence following weeks of scrutiny over leaks at the Pentagon amid massive spending reductions at the Department of Defense, The Hill reports.

“Let’s be honest. This uncertainty, this chaos, is no accident. The president of the United States has chosen. Chosen to destroy the federal government’s ability to help people.”

— Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), quoted by The Hill.

— Will Saletan

“We live in a moment when our freedoms are once again under attack from the highest office in the land. We see things that would be familiar to our revolutionary predecessors: the silencing of critics, the disappearing of people from our streets, demands for unquestioning fealty.”

— Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D), quoted by the Boston Globe.

Numerati

72%

69%

$1,000

59%

A new AP-NORC poll finds 39% have a favorable opinion of Donald Trump and 58% have an unfavorable view. Similarly, a majority of the public disapproves of Trump overall as president, 59% vs. 39%. Those numbers are lower than Joe Biden’s when he left office.

$100 million