Sky News: Donald Trump has made changes to the top of his campaign team for the second time in two months, as he looks to regain votes in key states.
The Republican presidential nominee has brought in conservative media executive Stephen Bannon to be chief executive of his campaign.
Republicans close to Mr Trump say the move will allow him to embrace the aggressive style that helped him win the party’s nomination.
It is also reportedly also aimed at marginalising current campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who had encouraged Mr Trump to be less aggressive and to improve his relations with the party hierarchy.
Mr Manafort will keep his title but Mr Bannon will be in charge of campaign staff and operations.
Mr Bannon, a former naval officer and Goldman Sachs banker, will step aside from his job as chairman of right-wing website Breitbart News in order to run Mr Trump’s campaign.
He has been involved with Breitbart News since the website began in 2007, regularly interviewing Mr Trump during the campaign.
Mr Bannon has not run a political campaign before, but he has made conservative documentaries, hosted a Breitbart-branded radio show and raised money for the website.
Last year, he was described by Bloomberg as “the most dangerous political operative in America”.
Mr Trump is also bringing in Kellyanne Conway, a pollster who has previously worked with him in business and as a senior advisor on the campaign.
At 49, she is the first woman to manage a Republican presidential campaign but she faces a candidate who has already voiced his dislike of polling.
Mr Trump told NBC’s Meet The Press last year: “I don’t want to waste money on pollsters – I don’t want to be unreal, I want to be me.”
It is unusual for such key roles to be re-shuffled so late in a campaign – the election is less than three months away.
But Mr Trump has fallen further behind his Democratic rival Mrs Clinton in recent weeks, his campaign overshadowed by a long list of controversies including a fight with an American Muslim family whose soldier son was killed in Iraq.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll on Tuesday showed Mrs Clinton has a six point lead over Mr Trump.
It comes after an Associated Press investigation found Mr Manafort had helped a pro-Russian governing party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2m in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012.
Under federal law, US lobbyists must declare publicly if they represent foreign leaders or their political parties and provide detailed reports about their actions to the Justice Department.
Violations are classed as felonies and can result in up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.
Mr Manafort, along with business associate Rick Gates who is also a member of Mr Trump’s campaign team, were working on behalf of the political party of Ukraine’s then-president Viktor Yanukovych in 2012.
