JOHN HARWOOD: Things are really bad within the Trump campaign. Donald Trump has come out of the convention period falling behind in the polls, prosecuting, losing in hopeless arguments with Gold Star family, with Paul Ryan and John McCain and Kelly Ayotte, and doing things that indicate that the professional campaign people who have been brought on to try to make him run an effective general election campaign are simply not breaking through with the singular style that he has of controlling the message every single day according to his whims. And I've got to tell you, I just got off the phone with Vin Weber, who is a friend of Paul Manafort, a former lieutenant of Newt Gingrich in the House. He said he's rejecting the Trump candidacy and he doesn't believe that Paul Manafort will go down with this ship. So there are limits to the patience of everybody in involved, including the people working most closely with Donald Trump.
THOMAS ROBERTS (HOST): And so Paul Manafort, John, was brought in to kind of stabilize, put the adult in the room, so to speak, of someone to helm what it meant to get to the Republican National Convention, to secure the delegates, to secure the nomination. It's been a bare bones staff by any presidential standards. But would Manafort leave within the next three months or within the next month if things are that bad?
HARWOOD: I have no indication that he is preparing to leave, but Vin Weber is a good friend and ally of his, and so when he says I don't think Paul Manafort will go down with the ship, that tells me that there's a level of discontent that has some limit. I don't know when the limit is, but you talked about adult in the room. Donald Trump has been rejecting repeatedly the political equivalent of adult supervision, and he is doing things in his own idiosyncratic style, but that is not consistent with moving from a primary campaign where he won in a very fractured Republican field and adding the votes that you need for a general election.130 million people are going to vote. He has to be additive now, not shrinking, and he's doing the opposite
