Paul Manafort said the New York Times story, describing internal struggles on direction and messaging within the Trump campaign, was “not correct.” | AP Photo Manafort denies reports of chaotic Trump campaign

Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Sunday echoed his candidate’s complaints about a recent story in The New York Times that depicted the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign as in disarray.

Paul Manafort said the story, which described internal struggles on direction and messaging within the Trump campaign, was “not correct.”


Manafort blamed the media for another seemingly off-message week for Trump, saying “most people did not interpret,” Trump’s Tuesday remarks that “Second Amendment people” could stop Democrat Hillary Clinton as a call for violence, jokingly or not.

“It was not meant at all to be a threat,” Manafort said. “His point about the Second Amendment comment was that anyone who cares about the Second Amendment should be concerned about a Hillary Clinton presidency.”

He then attacked the Democratic presidential nominee for her 2008 remark about staying in the presidential race that year because “we all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.” Clinton apologized for the comment shortly after making it, a fact that was pointed out by CNN host Jake Tapper.

Tapper later asked Manafort about comments by Trump’s New York state co-chair, Carl Paladino, on a national radio show that Khizr Khan, the father of a slain American soldier, doesn’t deserve the label of “Gold Star parent” and implied that he has an “ISIS-type of attitude against America.”

“I’m not sure what he said,” Manafort replied, before shifting to criticizing the Clinton campaign for allowing the father of the Orlando nightclub shooter to sit behind the candidate at a recent rally.

“I know I am concerned that the father of the Pulse cabaret murderer, who killed a number of gays in Florida, was sitting in the VIP section of Hillary Clinton’s speech last week,” Manafort said. “He’s an avowed Islamic radical and that concerns me, she’s totally ignored that fact.”