President Trump is rocking his reelection team with less than four months to go until the November vote, replacing his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, in recognition of the decline in the president’s position in almost every public and private poll. since spring.
Parscale, who was appointed unusually early campaign manager in February 2018, will be leaving the job and Bill Stepien, currently the deputy campaign manager and a veteran political operative, will take over. Mr. Parscale will continue the campaign and become a senior advisor for digital and data operations.
Jared Kushner, son-in-law of the president and senior adviser to the White House, confirmed the movements on Wednesday night, saying: “Brad and Bill were anonymous heroes of the 2016 campaign and have done a great job building the infrastructure for the campaign of the President. for the 2020 race. Together they bring unique strengths “
The move comes as Trump’s advantages as a sitting president have been eroded in the face of a pandemic that has killed more than 137,000 Americans and hit the nation’s economy, once Trump’s most powerful argument for reelection. The President has come under fire for his handling of the coronavirus, and stopping the federal response has deepened the hole he finds himself in in state and national battlefield polls.
Trump is often described as his own campaign manager, and his political operation, overseen by Kushner, has been tailored to his wishes.
Among the pieces Parscale created was the digital fundraising gadget, which gave the president a cushion in recent months, when high-dollar in-person events were impossible to sustain due to the virus.
For over a year, Mr. Parscale has been the focus of intense scrutiny and news coverage of his operation and whether he was making a large amount of campaign money. Those items have included attention to his property and car purchases in Florida, where he lives, becoming a frequent source of attention that the President saw as a distraction.
Parscale, who was carefully chosen by Kushner and close to the Trump family, lasted longer on the job than most of the people who led multiple iterations of Trump’s 2016 campaign. And campaign aides stressed that Mr. Parscale is being asked to stay, unlike others who have been released from Trump’s orbit.
But Mr. Parscale has no political background, and suffered a form of fatal injury on paper three weeks ago when a highly publicized rally in Tulsa, Okla., To “restart” Mr. Trump’s campaign was sparsely attended. After boasting of nearly a million ticket requests, just over 6,000 people attended the June 20 event, a shame Trump couldn’t pass up.
The President sometimes rebuked Mr. Parscale for actual and perceived transgressions, sometimes yelling at him and once threatening to sue him.
