Manafort: Kasich 'Embarrassing his State'

Ohio Gov. John Kasich is "making a big mistake" by refusing to attend or speak at this week's Republican National Convention that's being held in his own state, Donald Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, said Monday.

"He's hurting his state and embarrassing his state, frankly," Manafort told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program about Kasich, the last Republican presidential candidate to drop out of the 2016 race. "But most of the Republicans who aren't coming are people who have been part of the past. And people who are part of the future of the Republican Party are, frankly, going to be here participating in the program."

Paul Manafort: John Kasich is making a big mistake, he's embarrassing his state https://t.co/lt5dFEH2q0
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) July 18, 2016

Manafort said that the campaign is trying in the convention not to have a "heavily laden program of politicians," but for Trump to show the rest of the story about who he is.

"You know who he is, but you only see him out there on the campaign trail and that's a part of him, but that's not all of him," Manafort said. "Not like we're trying to redo Donald Trump, just trying to expand the focus of who he is. You don't want politicians and frankly he's the outsider. You want people who do know."

Coming out of the convention, one of the bigger problems will be working on narrowing the number of states being focused on, Manafort added, but nationally, voters are angry and don't like presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

"They don't believe she tells the truth," he said. "She's not a messenger to them. They want change. They're not sold yet on Donald Trump. But they're open to Donald Trump and they don't appear to be open to Hillary Clinton."

Trump and his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, have been commenting about bringing law and order back to the United States. Manafort said Monday that the nation's violence, highlighted once again on Sunday with the shooting deaths of three police officers in Baton Rouge, La. are a result of "failed American leadership."

"And terrorism, the rise of ISIS, are all because of decisions made by Clinton when she was secretary of state and President Barack Obama," Manafort said. "It shows they didn't know how to deal with the problems of the world."

And that spreads to worldwide events as well, the chairman said.

"We had no intel in Turkey, he said. "We didn't know that [an attempted coup] was coming."

In the United States, "the cities have fallen apart. You go into the inner cities, Obama was supposed to be the guy who was going to come in and fix the problems . . . the cities are a mess. It was a ticking time bomb."

And Trump will change that trajectory in the nation's cities and worldwide, Manafort said.

"Part of it is just to have a consistent foreign policy to show that there are no special interests, to show that justice is going to be for all," he told the program. "We'll support our first responders and police in ways that are correct, but at the same time show some compassion for what's going on in the inner cities. We haven't built it out yet, because we weren't expecting this explosion to happen yet but it's part of our plan.

But we're going to be talking about the problems in the inner cities. They've been taken for granted by the Obama administration. You know, they think that's a vote base and they don't have to do anything but go back there every two years. And we're finding that the black cities, there is just as much frustration there as there are in the suburbs of America."

Meanwhile, the current election has a "[Ronald] Reagan type of quality to it," said Manafort. "You remember Reagan in 1980. Jimmy Carter was a very unpopular president but Ronald Reagan had the same arguments against him that Donald Trump does."

Manafort also denied talk that Trump had wavered on picking Pence.

"Donald called Pence on Wednesday night and Wednesday night we agreed we would be making the announcement on Friday morning," said Manafort.

But because of the attacks in Nice, France, Trump pushed back on making that announcement, as he was "emotionally bothered" by what he saw on television.