U.S. President Donald Trump gestures at the 2025 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit in Gyeongju, South Korea, October 29, 2025. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu
During Donald Trump's first presidency, veteran television journalist Dan Rather used the phrase "flock of felons" to describe the many Trump allies who faced criminal charges. One of them was veteran GOP operative Paul Manafort, who served as one of Trump's 2016 campaign managers before becoming the target of a federal investigation after Trump was sworn into office.
Manafort went to federal prison after being found guilty of tax and bank fraud but received a presidential pardon from Trump in December 2020.
In an article published in late October, Politico reporter Kenneth P. Vogel details the 76-year-old Manafort's efforts to make a comeback during Trump's second presidency.
"Brescia, Italy, is not the most obvious place for a disgraced American politico to make a triumphant return," Vogel reports. "But when Paul Manafort appeared at a political event there in April — less than five years after his convictions on financial and lobbying crimes as well as witness tampering were wiped away by a pardon from President Donald Trump — it marked the completion of an unlikely full-circle journey from high-flying global fixer to federal inmate and back."
Vogel continues, "Manafort was in the industrial city on the outskirts of Milan with a new client on whose behalf he was trying to engineer a political makeover that evoked some of the 1980s-era projects that made him a near-mythic figure in the lucrative world of foreign campaign consulting and lobbying."
Now that Trump is back in the White House, Vogel notes, Manafort is "aggressively courting far-right populist interests around the world looking to align themselves with Trump."
"While Manafort remains in Trump's good graces," Vogel reports, "he is not nearly as close to the inner circle of foreign policy decision-making as he was under (President Ronald) Reagan or (President George H.W.) Bush. But the formula of casting far-flung politicians as pro-Trump populists could be a blueprint for winning favor in Trump's Washington in much the same way that opposing communism was during the Reagan and Bush Administrations."
Manafort's associates, according to Vogel, believe he is determined to "reclaim his legacy and go out on his own terms."
Hector Hoyos, a former Manafort business partner, told Politico, "When everybody is searching for you and they want your advice and they want to listen to you.… it just makes you feel validated to a certain extent. He is fulfilling that elder statesman role at this time in his life."
Read Kenneth P. Vogel's full article for Politico at this link.