"The sharks are circling": Knives out in MAGA World for Trump's campaign chiefs as polls get worse

An increasingly frustrated Donald Trump, watching his support sinking in key battleground states, refuted a storm of rumors that he may be getting ready to throw his two co-campaign managers overboard. But the mere suggestion of a change in leadership just two-and-a-half months out from Election Day is a sign of that the Trump campaign, far from finding second wind against a rejuvenated Democratic Party led by Vice President Kamala Harris, is gripped with anxiety as it struggles to reverse its candidate's poll trajectory.

Talk of replacing Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, two veteran GOP operatives charged with leading Trump's campaign, stems primarily from an August 2 meeting Trump had with Lara Trump, the daughter-in-law he picked to oversee the Republican National Committee, and Kellyanne Conway, who ran his 2016 campaign but has no official role in its third iteration. Conway told reporters that the meeting was focused on strategy, but according to a Guardian report, Trump's relaying of her points in an already high-strung atmosphere was interpreted by senior campaign officials as a play by Conway to undermine them or take control of the campaign.

Another former Trump aide, Corey Lewandowski, is returning to Trump's orbit in an official capacity to advise the campaign's senior leadership, with LaCivita and Wiles announcing in a statement that they are "continuing to add to our impressive campaign team." Puck News' Tara Palmieri suggested the possibility of a more substantial power shift, writing on X that Lewandowski had been boasting about his potential new role as campaign chairman, a position "essentially a layer above Wiles and LaCivita."

"This comes as Trump, superstitious and nostalgic, wants the team that helped him win in 2016 back," she observed.

Though Trump told a New York Times reporter last Friday that he was "thrilled" by LaCivita and Wiles' performance and had no plans to fire them, a number of other figures tied to the 2016 campaign told the Guardian that they are considering a concerted push to further shake up the leadership.

"The sharks are circling," Guardian reporter Hugo Lowell said on MSNBC. "It has been a bad enough month, the previous month, for the Trump campaign that there are enemies, real and perceived, that are starting to look at Trump's campaign leadership team and really starting to tell Trump, you know, 'you've got to get rid of these guys, you've got to reset it.'"

Far-right white nationalist Nick Fuentes, a onetime Trump booster stung by the former president's decision to pick a running mate with an Indian-American wife, has been far less circumspect about his desire for LaCivita and Wiles' ouster. In a video posted to Rumble on Tuesday, he threatened to "formally declare war" on Trump and encourage Republicans not to vote if he doesn't get rid of the co-campaign managers and also meet Fuentes' demands to completely ban immigration and vow to avoid going to war with Iran.

There's plenty of precedent for a summer leadership shake-up; Trump replaced his campaign chiefs in both 2016 and 2020 around this time, a fact of history that is feeding into the prevailing sense of unease. But it's Trump's current behavior that's causing the most heartburn among allies, who complain that he is sabotaging himself by obsessing over conspiracy theories, needlessly insulting powerful Republicans, alienating key voting groups that the GOP had worked assiduously to convert and attacking Harris over her racial identity and crowd size rather than talking about the concerns of everyday Americans.

At the August 2 meeting, which came days after Trump claimed before an audience of Black journalists that Harris identified as Black only for her political benefit, Conway told Trump that he should focus on his policy differences with the Democratic ticket. Senior officials who had been giving Trump the same advice bristled at what they saw as an intrusion into their territory. Either way, Trump appears to be unmoved by those efforts, reportedly telling aides "I know what I'm doing" and an audience of well-heeled donors "I am who I am."

Trump's erratic behavior is creating a sort of paralysis around him, with top aides reportedly too scared to share alarming polling data and information with the former president in fear of upsetting him. If Trump is unwilling or unable to successfully adjust to the new reality, there's not much Republicans can do; unlike LaCivita and Wiles, the former president is the party's anointed nominee and cannot easily be pushed out. And there appears to be no appetite for trying.