Ex-campaign chief attempts comeback
Former Trump manager pursuing other endeavors
Brad Parscale was sounding upbeat. He has a new company and, he believes, a brighter future.
Parscale, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, said he was trying to move on from that Sunday in late September when he made the national newscasts, after police were called to his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. His wife told officers he was inside the house, acting erratically, with a loaded and cocked gun.
Now he is turning to real estate and plans to buy houses and flip them, he said in an interview this month, something he said he was good at. He is also restarting his political consulting firm, Parscale Strategy, and trying to kick off a startup called Nucleus, to process and analyze data for conservative politicians.
“I spent five years developing the only automated web-based ecosystem that connected all our departments and made our campaign the most efficient in history,” Parscale said. “And now I want to bring this technology to campaigns all around the world who are right of center.”
Once a midlevel marketing executive in San Antonio, Texas, Parscale rose to the president’s inner circle and was hailed, somewhat hyperbolically, as the tech genius whose social media savvy won Trump the 2016 election. Parscale became an expert in making the Trump campaign messages go wildly viral, and his dark humor seemed in tune with Trump and his mememaking fan base.
But people who know and worked with Parscale say he grew too enamored with his proximity to power, and naïvely comfortable with his insider status. When he was replaced as campaign manager in July amid questions about his stewardship, it was an embarrassing blow.
In recent phone interviews, Parscale, 44, said he felt demonized by the left, which accused him of digital dark arts he did not employ, and scapegoated by the right for Trump’s failed campaign.
But his initial impulse to jettison politics altogether soon gave way to the gravitational pull of the game.
A serendipitous pairing with Trump
The story of how Parscale came to work for Trump is serendipity, plus a little of Parscale’s opportunistic savvy. He was already a successful marketing executive, when about 10 years ago one of his clients was on a flight next to someone who was about to take a job working for the Trump family. The client jotted contact info on an airplane napkin, and soon Parscale was looped in to bid on some digital work for the family.
Parscale and the Trump family clicked, and when the presidential campaign started, he was the obvious choice to handle the website and digital advertising.
Another bit of good fortune for Parscale: He would inherit a data operation from the Republican Party that had been totally overhauled, and he had the perfect candidate to try out the new system. Trump had limited resources and few data ideas of his own. He did not have a big existing digital team. He just had Parscale.
What Parscale had was the trust of the president’s family, and a keen sense of the president’s voice and fondness for discord, which he wasn’t afraid to exploit.
His lack of expertise made him especially open to a powerful tool for
reaching voters: Facebook. While others spent on television ads and hiring huge teams, Parscale saw that Facebook ads were cheaper and radically effective at reaching Trump voters. He decided to lean on Facebook for analytics rather than hiring a large team of his own.
His genius was in making provocative content, editing it into fast-moving clips and testing it quickly to figure out the right tempo and tone.
A “fetishization” of data for Parscale
In the shock of Trump’s 2016 win, liberals and pundits wanted to know how it had happened and looked toward Silicon Valley. A mystique grew around Parscale.
“Secret Weapon,” announced CBS News. “Brad Parscale, digital director for Trump’s campaign, was a critical factor in the president’s election. Now questions surround how he did it.”
Regardless of how much digital genius was really there, Parscale’s power grew after 2016. As Trump looked ahead to the 2020 election, he chose Parscale as the 2020 campaign manager.
By this time, former colleagues say, Parscale had developed an inflated sense of his importance. He saw himself as a campaign manager but also as a partner to Jared Kushn
er, the president’s son-inlaw, who was overseeing the campaign from the White House, and he enjoyed the limelight.
But in the summer, Parscale fell out of favor. In a particularly embarrassing moment, teenagers on Tiktok reserved more than 1 million tickets for a Trump rally in Tulsa, Okla., that Parscale had organized, inflating the numbers as a prank. Only about 6,200 people showed up, infuriating the president.
At the same time, Parscale’s spending decisions were increasingly being questioned; the campaign had blown through more than $1 billion since the beginning of 2019. Trump was livid about his standing in the polls. Kushner agreed that a change was needed and supported the decision to elevate Bill Stepien and demote Parscale.
While friends advised Parscale to make a clean break from the campaign, he chose instead to accept a smaller role.
In a recent interview on Fox News, Parscale blamed his enemies in Trump’s orbit for his downfall.
He told Fox News that he was no longer in touch with Trump. “It’s pretty hurtful,” he said. “But it’s probably just as much my fault as his. I love that family. And I gave every inch of my life to him, every inch.”