Throughout his presidential campaign, Republican front-runner Donald Trump has played the angry populist, railing against fat-cat donors, influence peddlers, and Washington establishment insiders who rig the system to the detriment of the American people. "These people have hundreds of millions of dollars that they've given to these politicians, and these politicians are puppets for them," he exclaimed recently. "With me, I'm going to do what's right for the country."

Yet when Trump needed a political operative to oversee his campaign's crucial delegate strategy—which could determine whether he wins the nomination at the Republican convention in July—he hired one of the most prominent Washington insiders: Paul Manafort, a veteran Republican lobbyist and consultant who has made millions of dollars working the system on behalf of corporations seeking government favors as well as Third World strongmen and kleptocrats.

Manafort has been honing his skills as a delegate wrangler for four decades, starting with Gerald Ford's 1976 campaign, when the sitting but unelected president faced a stiff challenge in the Republican primary from Ronald Reagan. Manafort subsequently handled this function for other GOP presidential candidates, from Reagan in 1980 to John McCain in 2008. The Chamber of Commerce's Scott Reed, who worked with Manafort during Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, described him as "a proven vote counter (who) knows how to strategically move a campaign." Manafort, who was the Dole campaign's convention manager, led the effort to minimize the role at the convention of Patrick Buchanan, the right-wing commentator who placed second in the GOP nominating contest, so that Dole would not be burdened in the general election with Buchanan's controversial conservative positions.

Hunting delegates was a side job for Manafort, who focused on lucrative work as a lobbyist for under-fire corporations and reviled political figures. In 1985, for example, Manafort and an aide flew to Angola, which was then in the middle of a bloody civil war, to woo Jonas Savimbi, a onetime Maoist and brutal warlord who allegedly relied on blood diamonds to fuel his army. According to the Washington Post, Manafort's pitch to Savimbi was almost derailed by a furious outbreak in fighting, but he managed to land a $600,000-a-year contract to represent Savimbi and his UNITA party in Washington, DC, and to try to help Savimbi win US funding. Spy magazine noted that Manafort's firm at the time—Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly—did well by Savimbi:
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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/04/donald-trump-adviser-establishment-insider-paul-manafort