The man behind Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has a knack for spectacle, an eye toward making money and a proven willingness to defy the Republican Party.

In other words, Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski is a lot like his new boss.


Lewandowski, who has been advising Trump since January and managing his improbable — and, for many Republicans, headache-inducing — run to the top of the GOP primary field in national polls has spent the past decade and a half drifting away from the party establishment.

He left a short stint at the Republican National Committee in 2001 to manage the failed reelection campaign of a rogue senator before landing eventually at the Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity, where he primaried New Hampshire Republicans and mocked the state’s Democrats until joining up with Trump.

In that time, Lewandowski cemented a reputation in New Hampshire political circles for getting things done, even if it means ruffling feathers. “He’s a good guy personally, [but] he’s a bomb thrower,” said one longtime New Hampshire Republican political operative.

“Corey was a pretty aggressive guy on issues. He was a go-getter … and he was not afraid to air out an issue,” said Bruce Berke, a Granite State lobbyist and an adviser to the Republican primary field’s latest entrant, Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

He’s also drawn attention for his new Trump-sized paychecks, which would add up to close to a quarter of a million dollars annually.

“Corey has mouths to feed, and a business opportunity to go and make $20,000 a month doesn’t come around every day,” said former state party chairman Fergus Cullen, pointing out that Lewandowski, 40, supports a family of six and lives in a spacious home in Windham, on the Massachusetts border, valued at over $800,000 (that’s a lot for New Hampshire).

The Trump campaign and Lewandowski declined to comment for this story. “Only one guy on the campaign that matters!” texted a spokeswoman.

“He certainly wouldn’t be supporting Donald Trump if he didn’t believe in him,” said Jerry DeLemus, a Republican activist in New Hampshire best known for his support of rogue Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who officially became a Trump supporter over the weekend and called Lewandowski a “really decent man.”

The grandson of a union printer, Lewandowski grew up poor in the 1980s in the hardscrabble mill city of Lowell, Massachusetts, playing pond hockey in the winters and going on to graduate from the city’s branch of the University of Massachusetts.

Drawn to Ronald Reagan’s unabashed work-hard, get-rich version of the American dream, Lewandowski became an active Republican and moved to Washington after graduating. There, he worked on Capitol Hill while earning a master’s degree in political science at American University.

Lewandowski worked briefly for the RNC in 2001, as the legislative political director for the Northeast, before leaving the establishment behind.

His rift with “the country club Republicans,” as he’s known to call them, can be traced to another presidential campaign that ticked off the party.

In February 1999, New Hampshire Sen. Bob Smith launched a long-shot bid for the Republican nomination, irking the local GOP, which worried he could catch on in his home state and make the first-in-the-nation primary irrelevant by discouraging other candidates from campaigning there.

As it turned out, Smith didn’t catch on anywhere, so he left the party in July to seek the nomination of the Taxpayers’ Party, before disavowing that party, too, and running as an independent. That lasted until Rhode Island Sen. John Chafee died in October, when Smith dropped out of the race and repledged his fealty to the Republican Party so that he could inherit Chafee’s chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works Committee.

The Republican Party was ready for Smith to retire at the end of his term, but he sought reelection in 2002, recruiting Lewandowski from the RNC to manage his campaign. Several of Smith’s GOP Senate colleagues took the unusual step of endorsing his primary opponent, then-Rep. John E. Sununu, the son of the state’s former governor, who won the primary and the seat, putting it safely back in the hands of the country club Republicans.

By his association with the ousted senator, Lewandowski had burned bridges with the party, said Cullen.

He spent five years as a lobbyist, starting at the New England Seafood Producers Association, before landing with the deep-pocketed Americans for Prosperity in 2008. AFP’s ability to outspend candidates in small, local races made it a factor in New Hampshire Republican primaries, and Lewandowski again became a thorn in the state party’s side.

Most notably, in 2012, AFP backed computer-repair magnate Josh Youssef over a more moderate Republican in a state Senate primary, despite reports that Youssef owed $50,000 to the IRS and allegations that he was hiding assets to avoid making child-support payments to his ex-wife, because Youssef’s views aligned more closely with the group’s anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda.

Days after Youssef won the primary with Lewandowski’s support, the Republican leadership publicly called on their nominee to answer for allegations that he violated campaign laws by misusing the identities of local Republicans to make it look like they supported his candidacy.

Youssef lost in the general election, contributing to a narrowing of the Republican majority from 14 seats to two in the Senate and hard feelings in the party. “That’s a seat that Republicans should hold,” said Berke. Youssef is now a county chairman for Trump in New Hampshire.

At AFP, Lewandowski also showed an ability to draw crowds to events and pull off attention-grabbing gimmicks. At the group’s Tax Day rally in 2010, he pulled a cardboard cutout of Democratic Gov. John Lynch onto the steps of the Capitol building in Concord and began debating it, to the crowd’s delight.

In April 2014, AFP and Citizens United held a “Freedom Summit” in New Hampshire, the first Republican cattle call of the 2016 presidential cycle, where Trump and Lewandowski met. They kept in touch over the intervening months, and Trump evidently decided he had found a kindred spirit.

One Trump insider joked the two had found each other on Match.com.

They even dress alike. “He wears a suit a lot, which for New Hampshire is odd,” the longtime Granite State political operative said of Lewandowski. “You don’t really wear suits in New Hampshire.”

The operative, who did not want to speak negatively about a fellow Republican on the record, had another theory of Lewandowski’s and Trump’s decision to partner up: They both had few other options. “Any serious person in Washington could never work for [Trump], because it would just destroy your career and you’ll never be respected by anyone around here.”

Since the two joined forces in January, Trump has taken care of the bombast, while Lewandowski has been executing on the logistics, which so far consists largely of getting Trump in front of cameras and crowds.

Despite all the bridges burned, an ability to execute may save Lewandowski from political career exile should Trump’s campaign fizzle, as many Republican leaders say they expect it to, when the cameras and the crowds move on.

Greg Moore, who replaced him as AFP’s New Hampshire director, said his old boss excels at the “blocking and tackling” of political agitation.

“He always made sure the ‘i’s are dotted and ‘t’s are crossed,” said Moore. “I assure you the trains will run on time.”

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