Notoriously short on patience and quick to pull the trigger when he’s unhappy, President Donald Trump pushed out George Gigicos, his organizer for post-election events, after a Phoenix arena had empty seats for a key rally where the President came out swinging at critics.
Gigicos joined former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus as a key Greek-American aide sidelined over Trump’s displeasure with their performances and was fuming before he took the stage at the Aug. 22 Arizona appearance when he saw it wasn’t standing room only, Bloomberg financial news agency reported.
Gigicos, the former White House Scheduling and Advance Director, set up the event at the Phoenix Convention Center as a contractor for the Republican National Committee (RNC).
Trump was visibly upset before he took the stage after he saw on a TV monitor the large multi-purpose room was half-full. The space was divided by a wall and most of the audience stood, while a portion was off to the side, the Washington Examiner said in a report
A city of Phoenix spokesperson estimated 10,000 people were in attendance, though it likely would have been higher if the entire room was used it was said.
While at the event, Trump told his long-time security aide Keith Schiller to tell Gigicos he was done organizing rallies, according to Bloomberg.
Gigicos had already stepped down from his White House job on July 31 and had been working for the RNC and Trump’s re-election campaign, as well as running his own consulting business in that time.
Trump is big on TV presentations and crowd sizes including the ridiculed estimate his inauguration was the biggest in American history despite photos showing big empty patches around the event.
Keith Schiller, inform Gigicos that he’d never manage a Trump rally again, according to three people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg said. Gigicos, one of the four longest-serving political aides to the President, declined to comment to the news agency.
Trump used the event to go bombastic and launch strident attacks on critics of his comments after the violent white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia and as he threatened to shut down the government if Congress didn’t fund a border wall with Mexico and as he even assailed the state’s Republican Senators and other GOP politicians.
HOLLOW EVENT
Gigicos had staged the event in a large multipurpose room. The main floor space was bisected by a dividing wall, leaving part of the space empty. There were some bleachers off to the side, but otherwise the audience was standing – and the scene appeared flat, lacking the energy and enthusiasm of other rallies, Bloomberg reported.
Trump’s first words when he stepped to the microphone: “Wow, what a crowd, what a crowd” and a week later was still boasting about the size, contradicting what he said while there.
Gigicos organized all of Trump’s signature campaign events and his occasional rallies since entering office but, like a trail of others, found what happens with Trump who wants to know what has been done for him now, not before.
Over the past two years, Trump had often assigned the blame — rightly or wrongly — to Gigicos when his rally logistics weren’t perfect. But his irritation usually blew over quickly. When his microphone had problems at a rally in Pensacola, Florida, in January 2016, Trump bellowed: “The stupid mic keeps popping! Do you hear that, George? Don’t pay them! Don’t pay them!”
Gigicos is of Greek descent and has ancestry from Kalamata. He studied at Birmingham–Southern College in Alabama, graduating in 1990. He worked in advance planning for the United States Department of the Treasury under President George H. W. Bush and later worked as an event planner at the Orange County Convention Center in Florida.
He founded a communications firm known as the Telion Corporation in 1999, and also worked for the Republican campaigns of George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.
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