Trump Campaign’s New Chief Brings Political Expertise

After more than a year of running his antiestablishment presidential campaign on instincts and television appearances, Donald Trump this week ceded some control to an adviser deeply embedded in the Republican firmament.

Paul Manafort, who has worked for Republican presidential candidates dating back to Gerald Ford in 1976, was announced as Mr. Trump’s “convention manager,” though his role is far more expansive than his title appears.

Since joining the campaign last month, Mr. Manafort, 66 years old, has expanded his portfolio to include virtually all aspects of the campaign except for Mr. Trump’s events, which will remain under the auspices of Corey Lewandowski, the embattled campaign manager.

The campaign has seen internal clashes between Messrs. Manafort and Lewandowski in recent weeks, according to people familiar with its operations. The tension peaked when Mr. Lewandowski, who has been charged with misdemeanor assault for an incident with a female reporter in Florida, fired a Colorado operative who communicated directly with Mr. Manafort without first alerting Mr. Lewandowski, who outranked him before the latest reorganization.

Now, as Mr. Manafort said in a Friday interview on CNN, he is outranked only by Mr. Trump.

“I work directly for the boss,” Mr. Manafort said. Mr. Lewandowski didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Manafort said in an interview Friday that the tension between him and Mr. Lewandowski had been overdramatized and the two are speaking daily and working together better as they are getting to know each other.

He expects to steer Mr. Trump toward more traditional campaign elements such as speeches, coordinated messaging and talking points for surrogates, who to this point have been given no coordinated guidance from the campaign, he said.

“The nomination process has reached a point that requires someone familiar with the complexities involved in the final stages,” Mr. Trump said in a statement released by his campaign. “Paul is a well-respected expert in this regard and we are pleased to have him join the efforts to Make America Great Again.”

For a candidate who has long bragged about his aversion to traditional political protocol—he does no polling, little advertising and employs relatively few field operatives—Mr. Manafort represents a shift toward professionalism.

“It’s a smart move on Donald’s part,” said 1996 Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole, for whom Mr. Manafort was a top convention aide. “He has the experience and that’s what he does, he does conventions. He hunts for delegates.”

What’s less clear is if Mr. Manafort’s talents are being harnessed too late. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has a monthslong head start on establishing a sophisticated operation to wrangle delegates.

“It’s very late in the game to help him corral the nomination,” said Fred Malek, a Republican fundraiser. “This is the kind of organizational effort that the Cruz campaign was out doing months ago.”

Mr. Trump first added Mr. Manafort to the campaign last month, at the urging of longtime political adviser Roger Stone, after The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Cruz was poised to take 10 more delegates than the New York businessman from Louisiana—even though Mr. Trump won the state’s March 5 primary.

Mr. Manafort said revelations of the Cruz campaign’s ability to secure delegates in Louisiana served as an example of a needed wake-up call to upgrade Mr. Trump’s campaign operation.

“Louisiana helped to put the exclamation point at the end of the sentence,” Mr. Manafort said.

“He’s a peer,” said Scott Reed, a senior political strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who worked for Mr. Manafort on Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign. “He’s not some little kid that Trump can boss around and bully.”

Mr. Manafort, who with his staff will be based in Washington while the rest of the campaign is headquartered at Trump Tower in New York, is charged with protecting the front-runner’s delegate advantage and ensuring he acquires the 1,237 delegates required to clinch the GOP presidential nomination.

Mr. Trump must win about 70% of the outstanding bound delegates to reach the nomination threshold before the Republican National Convention in July. The last time a GOP nomination was in doubt before the party’s convention was 1976, when Mr. Manafort helped Mr. Ford fend off a challenge from Mr. Reagan.

“We had a war,” said J. Kenneth Klinge, a longtime Virginia GOP strategist who was working for Mr. Reagan at the time. “There’s not many others who know how to play that game anymore. He’s one of them.”

In the late 1980s, Mr. Manafort and other associates at his Washington lobbying firm—which counted as a client the Trump Organization, the candidate’s business—were the subject of a federal investigation into allegations that they steered U.S. housing subsidies to developers. Mr. Manafort admitted that he used “influence peddling” to get a New Jersey housing project approved with the Reagan administration. He told a House subcommittee that he did nothing illegal, and the firm was later sold.

Mr. Trump is hardly the first unorthodox politician for whom Mr. Manafort has worked. His international clients have included former Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos and Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president and Vladimir Putin ally ousted in the 2013 Orange Revolution that ultimately led to Russia’s invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

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