Bill Stepien: aide humbled over 'Bridgegate' takes charge for Trump
Bill Stepien has found himself thrust into the limelight after Donald Trump suddenly announced he was promoting the political operative to manage his 2020 reelection bid.
With less than four months until the election, Stepien faces an unenviable task. Trump is trailing Joe Biden by double digits nationally, and by significant margins in key swing states, according to latest polls.
As Stepien, previously Trump’s deputy campaign manager, takes on the leading role, he should at least be familiar with being in the public eye.
In 2014 Stepien, 42, rose to national attention when he was publicly named and shamed by the New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, for his role in “Bridgegate”, one of the pettiest political scandals to cause real-life suffering in recent memory.
The saga related to Christie’s aides deliberately closing down lanes approaching the George Washington Bridge, which links New Jersey and New York and is the busiest motor vehicle bridge in the world. The plan, which worked, was to cause a massive traffic jam in the town of Fort Lee, New
Jersey, whose mayor had declined to endorse Christie for re-election.
Disguised as an exercise to facilitate a traffic survey, gridlock resulted.
Responding in 2014 to the release of emails which revealed the traffic jam was a deliberate act of revenge, Christie said he was “embarrassed and humiliated by the conduct of some of the people on my team”.
“I was disturbed by the tone and behavior and attitude of callous indifference that was displayed in the emails by my former campaign manager, Bill Stepien,” Christie said at the time.
“And reading that, it made me lose my confidence in Bill’s judgment. And you cannot have someone at the top of your political operation who you do not have confidence in.”
Christie also asked Stepien to withdraw his nomination to be New Jersey’s Republican party chairman. It was an ignominious episode in the career of Stepien, who has worked for a range of prominent conservative politicians over the past two decades.
His first brush with presidential politics came in 2004, when he worked on George W Bush’s re-election campaign in New Hampshire, before he served as national director on John McCain’s 2008 campaign, winning praise from Steve Schmidt, McCain’s campaign director.
After McCain lost to Barack Obama, Stepien found his way to Christie, and ran his campaign for governor.
Long before that, Stepien’s big break came, Politico reported in 2017, when he met Mike DuHaime, a New Jersey political consultant, at an ice skating rink where Stepien worked.
Stepien went on to work with DuHaime on the presidential run of Trump confidant and the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, and on the 2006 Senate campaign of Lincoln Chafee, before his roles with Bush and McCain, according to Politico.
After his very public fallout with Christie, Stepien eventually found his way to the Trump campaign. He was hired by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in 2016, and went on to serve as White House political director.
Stepien then became an adviser to Trump’s re-election effort, before being appointed deputy campaign chair in May.