New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman reports that Trump’s former campaign manager was fired after Trump’s adult children Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr. (listed in order of how much Trump seems to like them) ordered he be fired. “Earlier Monday morning, Donald Trump and his adult children gathered for a regular strategy meeting at Trump Tower,” Sherman writes. “Also present was Corey Lewandowski, the campaign’s embattled manager. According to one senior Trump staffer briefed on the meeting, ‘things went south for Lewandowski, and he was fired.’”
This fits tidily into one of the narratives that has been central to the Trump campaign: That Trump is surrounded by both devils, who tell him to do dumb things that hurt his campaign, and by angels (mostly his children, usually just Ivanka) who tell him to stop doing dumb things. It was Ivanka, after all, who told him to stop referring to Mexicans as “rapists.” And Lewandowski, journalist grabber, was the biggest devil of them all.
But whether or not Trump’s kids engineered his downfall—and there’s no reason to doubt that they did—Lewandowski is little more than a fall guy for Trump’s recent troubles. Someone had to get pushed out the door and Corey Lewandowski was the easiest one of Trump’s thirty staffers to push. That’s not a coup, that’s just politics.