Trump demotes campaign manager after spending $325,000 on his Facebook page

Brad Parscale was in large part responsible for over-hyping the president’s thinly attended rally in Tulsa

Donald Trump has demoted his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, after weeks of cratering poll numbers and a disastrous rally in Tulsa that have mired his re-election bid in the doldrums.

Mr Trump announced Mr Parscale’s reassignment in an uncharacteristically fluent Facebook post, uploaded during the fallout from a major Twitter hack that saw many high-profile users’ accounts compromised.

“I am pleased to announce that Bill Stepien has been promoted to the role of Trump Campaign Manager,” the president wrote. Brad Parscale, who has been with me for a very long time and has led our tremendous digital and data strategies, will remain in that role, while being a Senior Advisor to the campaign.”

Mr Parscale will be replaced by the less well-known Mr Stepien, who worked as a political aide on the 2016 campaign and then became White House political director.

Mr Pascale was first appointed to manage Mr Trump’s re-election campaign at the start of 2018, having overseen the campaign’s sophisticated and effective digital operation during the 2016 election. An ally of Jared Kushner, he was long held in high regard by the president — but it seems a confluence of recent events and his relationships with other campaign staff may have done for him.

In May, he tweeted that the re-election effort was ready to launch a “juggernaut campaign” called “Death Star”, comparing the president’s multi-channel media strategy to a moon-sized space station built by an evil empire to destroy peaceful planets — and destroyed by insurgent, underfunded dissidents.

Mr Parscale later touted the president’s return to the campaign trail at a rally in Tulsa, boasting that more than a million tickets had been requested by supporters. But in the end, the arena was only one-thirds full and the overflow event had to be cancelled, reportedly enraging the president.

His profile had risen to such an extent that Democratic sources were going after him personally — a relatively unusual line of attack, especially so given the president’s own vulnerability. One campaigner said just weeks ago: “He’s becoming a brand in his own right on Trump’s dime”.

Mr Parscale’s consulting firm, Parscale Strategies, was prominently featured on his own Facebook profile just as the campaign spent $325,000 on running sponsored ads through it; the firm has also billed the campaign tens of millions of dollars for assorted services since the re-election effort began.

And Mr Parscale’s personal wealth was even the subject of an attack ad from the anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project, which said he had gone “from dead broke to the man Trump can’t live without” as he grew rich off his work for the Trump team.

Mr Trump seems optimistic about how the campaign will shake up under new leadership. The post announcing Mr Parscale’s ouster breezily predicted that this election will be “a lot easier” than 2016’s “as our poll numbers are rising, the economy is getting better, vaccines and therapeutics are on the way, and Americans want safe streets and communities!”

But in fact, Mr Trump remains direly outpolled by Mr Biden, who is drawing even or beating him in states that would never have been considered competitive even four years ago.