The effort by Donald Trump to start shaping the convention comes only days after he essentially clinched the nomination with a win in Indiana’s GOP primary. | Getty Trump tasks aide Michael Glassner with convention planning

Donald Trump is tasking one of his closest aides — deputy campaign manager Michael Glassner — with putting the presumptive GOP nominee’s mark on the party’s convention, multiple sources with knowledge of the move tell POLITICO.

Glassner is set to travel next week with a delegation from the campaign to the convention site, Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena, to assess the convention planning and receive a briefing from Republican National Committee officials involved in convention planning, according to the sources.


Glassner, who was traveling with Trump in West Virginia on Thursday, did not respond to requests for comment.

But the sources said he will retain his title and other responsibilities, in addition to the convention planning work, and will continue to work for the campaign out of its Manhattan headquarters and its Washington office, making occasional trips to Cleveland.

The effort by Trump to start shaping the convention, coming only days after he essentially clinched the nomination with a win in Indiana’s GOP primary, is among the first steps by the billionaire real-estate mogul to seize the reins of an official Republican Party apparatus that had scorned him for months as a threat to its orthodoxy.

As news of Glassner’s new assignment spread through the Trump campaign, several insiders wondered what it meant in the uneasy power-sharing arrangement between campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and his internal rival Paul Manafort.

Manafort’s official title is convention manager, which would give him oversight of the convention planning process, but Glassner is seen as loyal to Lewandowski, with whom he has worked closely since the earliest days of the campaign.

Glassner, a veteran of a handful of GOP presidential campaigns, also worked with Manafort on former Sen. Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign.