Donald Trump's Op-Ed the Latest Sign of Changes to Campaign Approach
The piece comes after two notable new hires.
— -- Donald Trump is always blasting "the establishment," but now he's doing so in a place where many of them will stand a better chance of seeing it.
Rather than tweeting his frustrations, which has been a long-held practice by the Republican presidential front-runner, he wrote an op-ed for The Wall street Journal that was published Thursday night.
"Rather than just a tweet at the RNC, the message was broadened," ABC News political analyst Matt Dowd said in an interview.
The inherent message at the heart of the op-ed is similar to what he has been saying in interviews and writing on social media. He was critical of the GOP delegate allocation process, claiming the procedures are leading to voters not having their voices heard.
"We must leave no doubt that voters, not donors, choose the nominee," he wrote.
While it's Trump's name on the op-ed's byline, the act of creating such a piece for the Journal to begin with appears to show the markings of other people at work.
"It shows a professional strategy that he had not had up until this point," Dowd said. "It should have happened two months ago."
The op-ed comes days after the addition of Rick Wiley as the campaign's national political director and weeks after the addition of Paul Manafort as convention manager.
Wiley previously worked as the campaign manager for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker until he ended his own presidential bid, and he also used to serve as political director for the Republican National Committee.
Manafort has been a longtime Republican operative, playing a role in the 1976 convention where Gerald Ford ended up winning the nomination in spite of a fight from Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole. That’s the last time Republicans had no clear nominee going into the convention.
"There's a group of people that know what they're doing now that are going to continue to change how the campaign operates moving forward," Dowd said of Manafort and Wiley.
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