We cannot make this up. David Duke’s campaign manager is leaving the campaign because his boss won’t downplay his KKK ties.

From The Advocate

David Duke, who is running for the U.S. Senate, lost his campaign coordinator Monday over a disagreement about how the former Ku Klux Klan leader should present himself to the public.

“My basic strategy was to show a different side of the man and present a real person, thus hoping his message would be more effective and debunking the image that the media had taken of him,” said Mike Lawrence in an interview with The Advocate.

Lawrence was hoping to engineer a political comeback for Duke, whose career height was in the early 1990s with credible runner-up showings in races for the U.S. Senate and Louisiana governor. Subsequent bids for Congress and for president failed to bring in anywhere near the 671,009 votes he received in 1991. He pleaded guilty in December 2002 to felony tax fraud and served time in a federal prison.

Lawrence said he wanted Duke to play down his past as Imperial Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, even to the point making light of it. But Duke was unwilling to do so, he said.

This shouldn’t be a shock that Duke is running as a racist. He only came back into politics after Donald Trump used his primary campaign to reach out to racists. Expecting David Duke to be something other than a racist asshat was unlikely.

David Duke is going nowhere in the polls, hovering around 4%. The people of Louisiana are tired of his stale politics and that’s the real reason why Mike Lawrence bailed.