Trump shakes up his team, demotes campaign manager
President Donald Trump is shaking up his reelection team with less than four months until November’s vote, replacing his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, in an acknowledgment of the president’s diminished standing in nearly all public and private polling since the spring.
Parscale, who was named campaign manager unusually early, in February 2018, will step out of the job, and Bill Stepien, currently the deputy campaign manager and a veteran political operative, will take over. Parscale will stay on with the campaign, becoming a senior adviser for data and digital operations.
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, confirmed the moves Tuesday night, saying: “Brad and Bill were both unsung heroes of the 2016 campaign and have done a great job building the infrastructure for the president’s campaign for the 2020 race. Together they both bring unique strengths.”
The move comes as Trump’s advantages as an incumbent president have eroded in the face of a pandemic that has killed more than 137,000 Americans and battered the nation’s economy — once Trump’s most powerful argument for reelection. The president has been heavily criticized for his handling of the coronavirus, and the halting federal response has deepened the hole in which he finds himself in national and battleground state polling.
Among the pieces that Parscale set up was the digital fundraising apparatus, which gave the president a cushion over the last few months, when in-person, high-dollar events were impossible to hold because of the virus.
Parscale has been the focus of intense scrutiny and news coverage about his operation and whether he was making an outsize amount of money from the campaign. Articles have focused on his purchases of property and cars in Florida, where he lives, becoming a source of frequent attention that the president saw as a distraction.