“No one's out. When you shake up your campaign, that usually means someone is out,” Katrina Pierson said Wednesday. | POLITICO Screen grab Trump spokeswoman: 'It's not a shakeup'

The announcement from Donald Trump’s campaign that it has hired two new high-level officials is “simply an expansion” and not a full-blown shakeup.

Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson pushed back hard against the notion that the hiring of pollster Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager and Breitbart executive Stephen Bannon as CEO represented anything other than a growing staff ramping up as Election Day grows closer.


“No one's out. When you shake up your campaign, that usually means someone is out,” Pierson said in a Wednesday morning interview on CNN. “This was announced as an expansion.”

Pierson said Conway’s hiring was a natural fit, since she already had a preexisting relationship with Trump and his campaign. She also said that even though Bannon comes to the campaign from a media outlet, he is “not in charge of communications, he's just the CEO.” She blamed Trump’s desire to run his campaign as a business for part of the negativity that often surrounds it.

The widespread reaction, that Conway and Bannon’s addition to the team was an attempt by Trump to remedy his campaign’s poor performance of late, was simply a creation of a biased media that Pierson said has “been writing this campaign's obituary for over 400 days and it hasn't worked yet.” She said the decision to make the hires was Trump’s and Trump’s alone, contrary to early reporting that the Manhattan billionaire’s children had urged the changes.

“People have been complaining that the infrastructure was small. We’ve had holes in there. Corey Lewandowski was gone. We simply filled that position,” Pierson said. “We brought in a CEO, something we didn't have before. This is not something that people are being replaced. This is an expansion of the team. We’re getting ready to run ads. We’re going into the debates.”

The Trump spokeswoman suggested that CNN was “probably the only one reporting that there's some shakeup that's happening,” and stuck to that claim when host Carol Costello informed her that typically conservative Fox News had similar reporting.

“It's not a shakeup. This is simply an expansion. We can ignore what the campaign is actually saying and make all the inferences that we want,” she said. “That seems to be what is called news today. But the facts are, we simply added to the campaign team. There's nothing new there.”