When MAGA Values Hit Home
Donald Trump’s supporters are willing to accept the lurid behavior he models, until it affects them personally.
Corey Lewandowski, who previously served as campaign manager for Donald Trump, has been hired by a Louisiana gubernatorial candidate, outraging one of the candidate’s biggest donors, who’s now demanding his money back.
Photographer: Al Drago/BloombergJohn Odom, a Donald Trump supporter and big Republican donor, has taken the extraordinary step of requesting that a GOP candidate return his $100,000 donation. The reason for Odom’s demand is even more unusual: Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who is running for governor, hired former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as a political adviser. Odom believes that hiring Lewandowski is a moral outrage, so he wants his money back.
Lewandowski isn’t the former Trump campaign chairman, a convicted felon who shared confidential 2016 polling data with his business partner, a Russian intelligence officer. That’s Paul Manafort, another member of the MAGA elite, who was pardoned by Trump in his final, lawless days as president. Lewandowski, you may recall, is the guy who grabbed a young female reporter for the right-wing propaganda website Breitbart, lied about it, and then was exposed by video evidence. He was subsequently accused by another Trump supporter of spanking her at a party at the Washington hotel where Trump processed what look very much like bribes.