“He’s gonna win,” Paul Manafort told The Huffington Post. “This is not a hard race.” | Getty Trump's campaign chairman: Picking a woman as VP would be 'pandering'

Choosing a woman as Donald Trump's running mate could be "viewed as pandering," according to Paul Manafort, the presumptive GOP nominee's campaign chairman and chief strategist.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Huffington Post's Howard Fineman published on Wednesday, Manafort also weighed in on Trump's tax returns, his proposed Muslim ban, the coming general-election contest with Hillary Clinton and the Manhattan mogul's plan to target moderate Hispanic voters.


The Clinton campaign and its allies have been hitting Trump for refusing to release his tax returns, as he promised in a 2015 interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt.

But Manafort said he’d be “surprised” if Trump did so, explaining, “It’s not really an issue for the people we are appealing to.”

“I wouldn’t necessarily advise him to,” Manafort continued. “His tax returns are incredibly complicated. I wouldn’t understand them, so how are the American people going to?”

Trump has said that he will not release the returns until a "routine" IRS audit is completed. In an interview earlier this month with Greta van Susteran of Fox News, Trump said, "Hopefully before the election I’ll release ... And I’d like to release.” But he has also downplayed the importance of the returns, claiming they won't reveal much.

Trump isn't interested in playing a hands-on role in the White House, Manafort said — that's the job of the vice president.

“He needs an experienced person to do the part of the job he doesn’t want to do. He seems himself more as the chairman of the board, than even the CEO, let alone the COO," Manafort said. “There is a long list of who that person could be ... and every one of them has major problems.”

Manafort also told HuffPost that Trump would likely “soften” some of his policy proposals, including his controversial plan to bar Muslim entry into the United States.

“He operates by starting the conversation at the outer edges and then brings it back towards the middle,” Manafort explained. “He’ll still end up outside of the norm, but in line with what the American people are thinking.”

As for Trump's appeal to Latinos, the vast majority of whom view him negatively, Manafort blasted “distorted” polling that relies on states like California and New York “where most of the radical Hispanics are.”

“If you look at Hispanics in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and even Florida, you see a different picture,” he said. “We’re going to target Hispanic voters in those and other swing states.”

“He’s gonna win,” Manafort told Fineman. “He gonna win unless we — meaning people like me — screw it up. This is not a hard race.”