“I don’t know what’s happening except for that they’ve lost control of Mr. Trump"

Lewandowski was the rare campaign manager who shadowed his boss, and his departure also meant the loss of a loyal aide who spent his days whispering in Trump’s ear, taming, massaging, and encouraging the volatile and restless candidate. It’s a role that Conway, who has been traveling with Trump, is expected to fill. Nonetheless, Lewandowski’s exit had consequences for the candidate and the campaign. “I don’t know what’s happening except for that they’ve lost control of Mr. Trump,” a second Trump aide told me ten days ago, in the wake of Trump’s attacks on the Khan family and his public refusal to endorse House speaker Paul Ryan in his primary race. “I’ve always maintained that the person who dominates his ear is the best manager. If you’re in his headspace, then you’re a successful manager.”…

As campaign chairman, Manafort never named a replacement for Lewandowki, absorbing his duties instead, and Trump went without a campaign manager from Lewandowski’s June 20 departure until Conway’s appointment last night. The result was a candidate who was often untethered from his own campaign and who earned rebukes from Manafort for his inability to stick to a script. “No marriage can work if one person is constantly trying to change the other,” says the first Trump aide…

The relationship between Trump and Manafort began to sour almost immediately after Manafort came aboard in late March, according to several sources with knowledge of the campaign. Manafort’s deputy and longtime consigliere, Rick Gates, hired experienced GOP operative Rick Wiley in mid April. Lewandowski had hired the firm WizBang Solutions as a direct-mail vendor for the campaign, paying the company about $500,000 in April, according to FEC reports. On Manafort’s watch, Wiley, a Wisconsin native, brought in another direct-mail firm with roots in Madison, Wisc., that was paid more than $730,000 by the Trump campaign over the course of just five days. Trump ruthlessly scours the campaign’s financial reports; when he saw the numbers, according to an aide, he peered up at Gates from his stack of papers and asked, “Well who the f*** are you?” Wiley left the campaign the following month.

Trump, however, never managed to resolve the civil war simmering between Lewandowski and Manafort, which had created dueling camps inside the campaign that remained even after Lewandowski’s defenestration. “Frankly there are still a lot of Lewandowski fans around who felt he was treated poorly after he helped engineer one of the greatest primary victories of all time,” says a source with knowledge of the situation.