One of President-Elect Donald Trump’s closest advisors says he won’t be joining the Republican candidate in the White House next year. Corey Lewandowski told the Daily Beast in an email that he “will not be a government employee” in Trump’s second administration. Lewandowski served as Trump’s campaign managed in 2016 but was fired in what Donald Trump Jr. called an “amicable” split. He remained close with Trump, meeting with him at the White House multiple times as a private citizen, and went on to become a TV political commentator in addition to his job as political strategist. He reemerged on the Trump campaign this year in August as a volunteer advisor, after the president-elect reportedly reached out and told him he missed the “fun” and “freewheeling” ways of his 2016 campaign. The Atlantic reported Lewandowski went “rogue”—much to the chagrin of other senior Trump aides—in encouraging Trump to return to his “killer” nature from 2016, which coincided with a raw and seemingly less disciplined Trump in the final weeks of the campaign. Unleashing the old Trump didn’t seem to dent his prospects, however, as the Republican pulled off the best electoral performance of his political career.
