Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager on Wednesday excoriated Donald Trump’s latest campaign hires — an unusually aggressive attack aimed at staffers from a team that has been keeping a low profile as its rival has self-immolated.

Hours after Trump announced that Steve Bannon, a top executive at the right-wing news site Breitbart, would take over as the campaign chief executive officer, Clinton campaign Chairman Robby Mook painted Bannon as an extremist fringe character who propagates racist ideas. He also took on Trump's new campaign manager, Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway, saying she is "in very good company with the new Trump team" and would do nothing to help the Republican nominee among female voters.


In bringing on Bannon, Trump is turning “his campaign over to someone who's best known for running a so-called news site that peddles divisive, at times racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories," Mook said during a hastily convened conference call with reporters Wednesday afternoon.

The campaign shakeup, according to Mook, proved that Trump plans to “double down on his most small, nasty and divisive instincts” in the final 82 days of the race. Mook said the new leadership, installed as Trump attempts to regain altitude after weeks of dropping in national and battleground state polls, is not surprising. “It’s clear that his divisive, erratic and dangerous rhetoric simply represents who he really is,” he said.

Trump's unfavorables are close to 62 percent, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average.

But Trump wasn’t really the point of Wednesday's conference call — discrediting Bannon was. Mook noted that Breitbart has “compared the work of Planned Parenthood to the Holocaust” and “repeatedly used anti-LGBT slurs in their coverage.” Bannon, he said, has personally spread conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama’s citizenship.

“The Breitbart organization has been known to defend white supremacists,” Mook added. “We absolutely expect with this change, for Donald Trump and the campaign as a whole to double down on more hateful, divisive rhetoric.” As for Conway, Mook said she "has a record of the same divisive politics of the rest of the people he has brought in."

The campaign followed up with a fundraising pitch about Trump's new leadership. "Donald Trump just promoted one of the most dangerous right-wing fringe attack artists out there to be chief executive of his campaign," the campaign said, trying to raise money off the shake-up.

The campaign’s decision to go after Bannon and Conway was somewhat out of character for a team that has deliberately stayed silent on the turmoil inside Trump Tower, as when Trump fired his first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, in June, promoting Paul Manafort to run the show. After The New York Times reported earlier this month that Manafort was to receive $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments from a pro-Kremlin political party he worked for in Ukraine, Clinton’s campaign tried to keep its narrative about Trump rather than being diverted to a side plot.

“This is a serious matter and there are real concerns about the pro-Kremlin interests engaged with the Trump team,” the campaign said in a statement reacting to the story. “As someone running to lead American policy and national security, Donald Trump owes the American public answers.”

But Bannon is different — the campaign is actively trying to make him part of the Trump story for the next three months.

His hiring, Clinton allies said, signals what they expect to be a scorched-earth strategy for the remainder of the presidential race — Trump now egged on by someone who traffics in personal attacks and conspiracy theories about Clinton. “If Trump is going to lose and he’s thinking about what comes next, it’s best to lose with what helped him gain the passionate following, because you can monetize that passionate following,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Obama. “If authenticity is your brand and you try to change, you undermine that.”

Mook’s comments were intended to ensure that any future conspiracy theory or attack Trump throws at Clinton will be associated with the dark arts of advisers like Bannon and Trump adviser Roger Stone.

Pfeiffer said he no longer thinks Trump is running to win. "If you are losing a presidential campaign," he said, "if you're getting outmaneuvered in every phase, you don't hire two people with no presidential campaign experience."

Instead, he said he expects Trump to double down on the contentious behavior and positions that sucked the air out of the Republican primary and vanquished his rivals in the first place.

Clinton’s campaign, feeling confident that Trump’s time and desire for a pivot is running dry, agrees — and chuckles at the notion that a strategy that worked for some 14 million Republican primary voters can translate to the electorate in a general election. “He has said very clearly he wants to be himself, he wants to say whatever is on his mind,” Mook said. “That’s how we should expect to finish out the campaign.”