On Wednesday night, Donald Trump left Brad Parscale, the evil swindler who has been running his campaign since Trump applied for reelection, right after his inauguration. Trump has officially demoted Parscale instead of firing him, replacing him as campaign manager with former White House political director Bill Stepien. But that language fails to capture the scope of public humiliation for Parscale, a boastful man who spends almost as much time promoting himself as promoting the candidate.
Parscale, true to Trump’s form, followed an all-time trolling campaign strategy that was designed to distract Trump voters from the extensive incompetence and corruption of his candidates and keep them focused on the goal of “unleashing the liberals. ” He focused largely on stunts designed to tickle the right-wing victims complex and preoccupy them with grievances, such as selling plastic straws as campaign merchandise (intended to provoke tears among liberals who don’t want to kill sea turtles) and spread fake videos. that portray mainstream journalists as making false accusations of racism.
But Parscale has been out of combat with Trump, especially since the disastrous Tulsa campaign kick-off last month that was clearly meant to be the resistance part of racist trolling, slated to coincide with the June 15 celebrations, just a few blocks from a largely black neighborhood that was also the site of one of the most notorious racial pogroms in all of US history, something Parscale made sure to let the press know that they understood.
That rally was very much in line with Parscale’s trolling-centered philosophy. Racist provocation guaranteed the attention of the mass media in the days leading up to the rally. Trump and his staff pledged a large turnout, and also publicly craved a potentially violent confrontation between police and protesters outside the rally, producing images that could be used in campaign ads designed to provoke even more racist anger and white-grieving policies in Trump’s base. (If they are not yet sold out).
Instead, the demonstration was a failure. Parscale’s trolling tweets promising a packed arena and record crowds (its implication was that the more Trump fans are called racists, the more they love Trump), ended up being counterproductive. Only 6,200 people submitted, less than a third of the arena’s capacity and a small fraction of the million ticket requests Parscale claimed to have received. Trump, who has clearly suffered severe withdrawal symptoms due to his addiction to crowds, has since become a Parscale scapegoat since then, according to CNN, “frequently cutting Parscale during meetings and disagreeing with almost every position he taking”.
Trump, whose only two personality traits are narcissism and being a jerk, loves to find someone else to blame for his failures. And to be clear, Parscale, like everyone who voluntarily joins Trump, deserves every ounce of the public humiliation that goes into the Trump experience.
Still, demoting Parscale probably won’t work to revive the Trump campaign, because the problem with the campaign (thank the stars) is the candidate himself. Trump has been openly hanging around for a message, and now he’s trying to make people believe that his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, is somehow a huge socialist threat and will turn this country into communist China and Soviet Russia. .
It is worth noting that it is the exact opposite of the strategy that Trump effectively used against Hillary Clinton. Trump won in 2016, strange as this seems to say, attacking Clinton, quite consistently, from the left.
I am not claiming that Trump ran as a leftist in 2016, he did not. He had all the standard right-wing views across the board, though he occasionally confused them and sought, for example, to reflect on the possibility of universal health care. But overall, both his own statements and his campaign platform were far to the right.
None of that prevented Trump from relentlessly criticizing Clinton from the left, sometimes for somewhat legitimate reasons, and others for indulging conspiracy theories that appealed to leftists. The idea was simple: get the idea that Clinton was somehow anti-left in the bloodstream, so a small but crucial proportion of likely Democratic voters decided to stay home or, in the most extreme cases, even vote for Trump or a third. party candidate as a way to glue it to clinton
“For all Bernie Sanders voters who will be excluded by a fraudulent superdelegate system, we welcome them with open arms,” Trump declared in June 2016, the night Clinton secured the Democratic nomination.
With the help of WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence services, he hastened to sell this narrative that Sanders would have won the nomination if “Crooked Hilllary” had not “manipulated” the main race (she did not), and the strategy worked for the thousand wonders. The Democratic National Convention was not only drowning in boos from Sanders delegates who accepted this conspiracy theory, but an estimated 12% of Sanders primary voters voted for Trump, helping to tilt the race in decisive crucial states.
But instead of trying to lure Sanders voters this time, Trump has taken the opposite direction, trying to vilify Biden by tying him to Sanders and describing them as a socialist threat to the nation.
“The Biden-Sanders agenda is: the agenda is the most extreme platform of any nominee for a major party, by far in the history of the United States,” Trump said during his rant at the Rose Garden on Tuesday.
He kept it on Wednesday, raving on Twitter about a “pact” between Sanders and Biden that is “more to the left than even Bernie had in mind.”
In other words, instead of trying to encourage Sanders voters to stay home, Trump tells them that voting for Biden is basically a vote for Bernie.
Trump played the same game with Clinton on certain issues, especially around race relations. His campaign tried to convince black voters that Clinton was racist and that they shouldn’t bother voting. She criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 Draconian Crime Bill and, especially, for her use of the racist term “super predator” in defending the bill at the time. (For which he apologized). The Trump campaign even put up an ad highlighting Clinton’s past use of racist language.
Initially, Trump made a move to use the same playbook with Biden this time, enthusiastically attacking the Delaware senator for his enthusiastic support for the same crime bill of 1994. But events have intervened, and since then Trump has It significantly marked his own racist rhetoric by trying to implicate Biden in some of the most radical proposals by Black Lives Matter activists, such as the abolition of the police. (There are merits to that proposal, but Biden has neither endorsed nor accepted it.) Rather than criticize that draconian crime bill of 26 years ago, Trump has embraced all its worst aspects, calling for the continuation of the mandatory minimum penalties and the explosion thereof. idea that resources should be “invested directly in those communities” rather than wasted in locking people up.
The argument from the Trump campaign in 2020, that Biden is secretly so much further away than his public figure might lead one to believe, is certainly exciting for the staunch Republican base, which loves to call anyone to the left of radical or socialist Nixon. . But Trump does not need to win over those people. They will vote for him again, regardless of personal cost, out of a desperate unwillingness to admit that it was foolish to vote for him the first time.
But when it comes to replicating Trump’s 2016 success, by convincing large numbers of potential Democratic voters to stay home or waste their votes, this strategy is likely to backfire. In fact, there may be typically Democratic voters who hesitate to vote for Biden, but mainly because they think he is not progressive enough. Trump is out there telling them that, at least on that front, Biden will give them whatever they want. It is a puzzling and self-destructive decision.
This failure to execute a competent, yet sinister, campaign strategy is Trump’s fault, no matter who else he blames. Stressed by the collapse of the polls, the pandemic and the collapse of the economy, Trump is withdrawing into the Fox News bubble, a world of hysterical right-wing hysterics who have no currency outside of that environment. He has given up any effort to persuade someone else not to vote for Biden, and sometimes it seems like he’s practically campaigning. for Biden when it comes to those younger, more left-leaning voters who might be the toughest for Biden.
Of course, the base-only strategy could still work, for the simple reason that Trump clearly plans to cheat in the election. As Dan Froomkin wrote for Salon on Wednesday, there is “ample evidence that Republicans will make unprecedented efforts to suppress the Democratic vote.” Trump doesn’t think he can convince Democratic voters to stay home, but he’s still exploring opportunities that could compel them to do so. Furthermore, there are good reasons to believe that Trump’s relentless moan about the “manipulation” of the election shows that he intends to reject the election results that show him losing and will refuse to leave the White House.
Still, at least for now, the spread between Trump and Biden is so great in the polls that even the deception may not eliminate it, or even get the results close enough for Trump to justify claims that he was “manipulated.” Trump knows this, which is why he’s panicking and scapegoating his campaign manager. But he is only to blame. He was the one who refused to do anything substantive to contain the coronavirus. He is the one who resists efforts to save the economy by paying people to stay home. And he’s the one who seems, in his stress, to have forgotten the strategy that worked so well against Clinton in 2016 that it was to discredit the Democratic candidate in the eyes of the left.
Trump’s only genuine strength was that he was a great troll, and it served him well in 2016. Now he can’t even do that. His only remaining hope for 2020 is that the Republican deception is widespread enough to remove Biden’s big advantage.
