Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski says campaign won’t change strategy

Corey Lewandowski, the manager of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and a recently appointed senior adviser to his 2024 campaign, said Sunday that Trump would not change his strategy in the final weeks of a race in which he has lost ground since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket.

“No, absolutely not,” Lewandowski said on Fox News when asked whether the campaign was considering a “pivot.”

“Honestly, I think she’s a much easier opponent,” he added, arguing that Harris was “saddled by and accountable to the American people” for the Biden administration’s economic and immigration policies while also being vulnerable to criticism for changing her positions.

Trump made a similar claim last month. But privately, neither he nor his top advisers believe the race got easier after Biden dropped out. Polls show the opposite: The clear advantage Trump had against Biden has evaporated against Harris.

In the face of that shift, Trump’s campaign is trying to stop his voters from growing pessimistic, while Harris’ campaign is casting her as the underdog to try to guard against overconfidence.

Lewandowski also denied that Trump had spent the past few weeks straying from the policy-focused message allies want him to deliver.

When Fox News host Shannon Bream quoted from two opinion columns chiding Trump for that pattern, Lewandowski said, “Donald Trump has had the opportunity over the course of the last multiple weeks to do very specific policy speeches,” and criticized Harris for not releasing more policy plans.

Lewandowski discounted surveys showing key demographic groups, including Black and Hispanic voters, shifting toward Harris — noting that polls in 2016 showed Hillary Clinton ahead throughout the campaign, and that polls in 2020 showed Biden leading by larger margins than they show now for Harris.

He was also asked about Trump’s own policy shift on abortion.

Trump appointed three of the six Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade — a fact he has boasted about — and led a staunchly anti-abortion administration. But recently, he has tried to publicly redefine himself in the face of evidence that voters are angry about abortion bans, and he has angered some abortion opponents in the process. One activist, Lila Rose, told Politico last week that she wasn’t sure she would vote for Trump anymore.

“If she chooses to stay home, then by tacit endorsement she’s supporting Kamala Harris, who has had a radical position on the issue of abortion,” Lewandowski said of Rose, repeating a common Republican lie that Democrats support abortion “after the baby’s been born.”

“What Donald Trump has said was let’s have the states decide,” he said, adding: “We have seen some relatively or very conservative states go to a position where women are given opportunities that you would not have expected because of that. But those states understand, whether it’s Ohio or Kansas, that women have the opportunity to make their own decisions, and the states are allowing that to happen.”

Kansas and Ohio are two of several states where voters have voted to protect abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022. Twenty-two states now restrict abortion more than Roe allowed, including more than a dozen with near-total bans.

Abortion-rights referendums will be on the ballot in 10 states this year, including Florida, where Trump lives. He has made inconsistent statements on how he will vote.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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