Trump Was Right To Fire Brad Parscale... But It Won't Help Him Avoid His Destiny

One of the most discussed pieces of reporting over the weekend was Olivia Nuzzi's New York Magazine look inside the chaotic, desperate last-minute Trump 2020 reboot. She goes beyond the reasons why Trump fired his rarely present campaign manager, Jared-puppet Brad Parscale, while noting the " tiny Tulsa rally Parscale had organized-- which followed weeks of massive hype-- preceded a spike in coronavirus infections in the city that, local officials said, was probably born of the event, where the guest list included Herman Cain, who later died... The campaign was in a hole so deep it was actually historic-- a deficit not just bigger, at this point in the race, than any an incumbent had ever overcome, but bigger than any an incumbent had ever even faced."

Nuzzi wrote that "It was July before he 'saw for the first time' that he could be defeated, according to the [senior White House official] official. And he didn’t blame himself. He blamed a cruel world, a crueler media, and the Death Star’s failure to defend him from both. 'They thought they were running one campaign: We’re on cruise control for the president who gave us the greatest economy of all time, and all the messaging would flow from there. Which socialist are we running against? Bop, bop, bop. And everything changed, and they didn’t change,' the senior White House official said. 'The president started to hate the ads. He hated Beijing Biden-- he didn’t come up with that name.' In the West Wing, officials filed away gossip and unflattering data points about the campaign manager as if drafting a dossier. When it was reported that Parscale’s web of companies took in $38 million between Inauguration Day and the spring of the pandemic, according to the Federal Election Commission, the story circulated widely. Though Parscale has declined to make clear what portion of his bills to the campaign amount to his personal salary, the New York Times reported in March that Trump had imposed a salary cap on Parscale of somewhere between $700,000 and $800,000-- enough for him to become in midlife a collector of luxury cars and seaside real estate, or at least a media caricature of one. But it wasn’t only Parscale’s spending on Parscale that worried-- or 'worried'-- some of his colleagues; it was his spending on everything else, too, like the $15,000-a-month payments to Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, and to Lara Trump, Eric Trump’s wife, both of whom crisscross the country as campaign surrogates.





The courtiers surrounding Trump began wondering aloud about what Parascale was even doing aside from milking the campaign for his own accounts. Nuzzi spoke with one of the country's most prominent #NeverTrumpers, Lincoln Project founder George Conway, who told her that the Orange Menace "wonders who’s truly loyal to him and who’s not and who’s making a buck on him," noting that "triggering Trump’s paranoia" is one way to defeat him. "It doesn’t matter who is the captain of the SS Trump, because Trump is the one who is going to run it into the iceberg in the end. If there’s more chaos, all the better. We try to trigger the chaos in Trump’s DNA."

It started eating away at Trump that Pascale was making so much money off him. Three weeks after Tulsa, he was unceremoniously fired-- replaced by Bill Stepien. Right after Trump fired him, Parscale tweeted a Bible verse: "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them." No one has seen him since.

Parscale’s value, as some saw it, lay not in what he could do for the campaign but in what he could do for Kushner. “Brad was willing to do whatever Jared said and keep quiet about it. Brad was willing to get yelled at by the president and not say to the president, ‘Well, actually, this was Jared’s decision,’ ” the first senior White House official said. “And Jared got to rule from afar because Brad would do whatever he said. In return, Brad made a fuck-ton of money and got to live by the pool in Florida. It was almost like this weird mutual partnership, whether they knew it or not.”

...In the case of the reelection campaign, what appeared to be a civil war at the highest levels of Trumpworld, with anti-Kushner factions inside and immediately surrounding the West Wing positioned against representatives of his interests at campaign headquarters, and a last-minute last chance for a reboot before November, was more like WrestleMania. The drama was both all-consuming and self-contained. Parscale and Stepien were both seen as Kushner allies, yet the regime change was nevertheless regarded as revealing some aspect of Kushner’s shifting status-- even as he remained functionally in charge the whole time. Kushner’s influence is so total that, even when his proxy is removed, he’s just replaced by yet another proxy. After all, if you’re not a “Kushner guy,” the dismissive term for officials perceived to carry out his will, what kind of guy could you even be?

...But while replacing Parscale with Stepien has the look of a reboot, at the strategy level it does not seem much has changed or is likely to. Asked how the campaign can formulate a coherent message, given what life is like for most people across the country today, senior adviser Jason Miller said, “It’s very direct: President Trump built the greatest economy in the history of the world, and he’s doing it again.”

But what about the polls? “I’d push back on that,” Miller said. “I have much more timely data, and much more accurate data, than what you have access to. And it’s improved over the last four weeks, and over the last two weeks, it definitely improved. We’re headed in the right direction.

...If I just woke you up in the middle of the night and told you a guy who is deeply involved in Bridgegate is now calling himself campaign manager for Donald Trump, you wouldn’t have said, ‘You’re kidding me! I’m shocked. How did that happen?,’ ” Stuart Stevens said with a laugh. You’d have said, Of course.

Stevens is a veteran of Republican presidential campaigns whose latest book, It Was All a Lie, is about his newfound realization-- at 67 years old-- that his life’s work was a mistake. As he sees it, Trump has a “management philosophy” that has guided him from the Trump Organization to the 2016 campaign to the White House and now to the campaign for reelection. “What Trump does is take people who are mediocre talent at best, who know they could never have the position they have if it were not for Trump, and it creates this instant loyalty to Trump. When you look at Trumpworld, it’s all these people who weren’t involved in presidential races, and it wasn’t because they didn’t want to be; it was because nobody would hire them. It’s not like Steve Bannon woke up one day and said, ‘I think I’d like to get involved in campaigns!’ Or Corey Lewandowski, all of these people. It’s how you end up with Brad Parscale. Top professionals won’t work for you.”

Almost all Democrats I know-- basically I know progressive Democrats-- abhor Biden's record. They're going to mostly hold their noses and vote for him-- a vehicle for saving the country from Trump and Trumpism. Not the #NeverTrumpers. They're enthusiastic. Biden's lifelong fiscal conservatism is just what they want in a president. Just ask Susan Molinari. "When Joe Biden makes a commitment, he always sees it through," the narrator says in this new Lincoln Project ad. Does that mean that we're about to vote someone in who is going to kill Social Security and Medicare?

#NeverTrump Republicans Will Likely Make A Real Contribution To Defeating Him And His Enablers

So far this year, some of my favorite campaign ads were done by the Lincoln Project, virulently anti-Trump Republicans who have lately turned their fire-power against vulnerable Trump enablers in the Senate, like Martha McSally (R-AZ) and Thom Tillis (R-NC). I'm hearing all kinds of buzz that they'll be turning their guns on Cory Gardner (R-CO), Susan Collins (R-ME), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Miss McConnell (R-KY), David Perdue (R-GA), Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Steve Daines (R-MT). They're doing a noticeably better job than the DSCC!

Yesterday Al Hunt wrote a piece for for The Hill, #NeverTrump Republicans-- Fringe Or A Force To Be Reckoned With?, speculation that #NeverTrump groups and politicians infuriate Señor T and "may gain traction in the election year." Unaware that MSNBC is crawling with anti-Trump Republicans, he suggests starting with the far less influential The Bulwark, which he described as "an online site and podcast directed by a Wisconsin conservative Charlie Sykes and including luminaries from the right like Bill Kristol, who was the editor of the Weekly Standard. It pummels the president's ineptitude and [lack of] integrity and his enablers."

The “Lincoln Project” brigade-- led by longtime Republicans like George Conway (his wife is Trump's counselor), Steve Schmidt, who once was a top aide to John McCain, and John Weaver, who was a top aide to Ohio Gov. John Kasich-- have run mocking negative ads that went viral after infuriating Trump.

There have been no tougher critiques of the Trump presidency than those written by conservative columnists Michael Gerson, George Will, Max Boot and Pete Wehner.

Mind you, none of these critics on the right have become big government, wealth redistributing left wingers. If Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress were to be elected this November, most of these people will be among their most articulate critics.

But they know the traditional conservative values of limited government, free markets and global leadership aren't in this president's vocabulary. They resent that their philosophical mentor William F. Buckley has been replaced in Trump's Republican Party by Sean Hannity.

“We can see how his con works," Charlie Sykes told me, “how he manipulates conservative memes and exploits the worst and darkest elements of the right. We're the ones calling out his bullshit because we know it's bullshit.”

Sykes was a popular Wisconsin conservative radio talk show host and author until Trump was elected. He left and wrote a book, How the Right Lost its Mind. And he founded The Bulwark.

Bulwark isn't just headlines and quick hits-- most pieces are well documented and devastating. One of the lead writers is Tim Miller, who was Jeb Bush's communications director.

On March 25, Miller laid out the timeline of the president's handling of the pandemic. It documented how Trump ignored the early advice of experts-- Republicans-- to vastly expand testing and obtain hospital supplies which soon would be essential. This was one of the earliest and most comprehensive accounts of the massive failure.

Most recently Miller weighed in on the ludicrous “Obamagate” conspiracy hoax, Trump's charge that the former president and his top officials illicitly sought to fix the last presidential election and then to undermine Trump's presidency.

Exhibit A is Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn, whom these conspirators claim was framed when he plead guilty-- on multiple occasions-- to lying to federal officials. William Barr, the attorney general of Trump's dreams, now seeks to drop all charges against Flynn.

A short reprise: Flynn got $45,000 from Russian state television, sat next to Vladimir Putin at a 2015 Moscow dinner and had an inappropriate conversation with the Russian ambassador at the end of the Obama presidency. Then-- when that call was revealed-- he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about it.

Why wouldn't the FBI want to interview him? They did, and he lied to them too.

Nobody forced Flynn to lie. Flynn is a serial liar.

The mere discussion of “Obamagate” is a travesty but, Miller notes, it's vintage Trump. His entire history in business and politics is to “create a preferred universe of convenient facts, then insist they are true, no matter what.”

It seems nearly certain that the children of Joe Biden and Donald Trump will be an issue going into November, and The Bulwark has gone there too.

These anti-Trump conservative activists are making their mark. What remains is whether former top Trump officials or Republican office-holders will enter the fray. If so, they could affect a few voters on the margins, like college educated white men, who went for Trump, 53 percent to 39 percent, last time.

The ex-Trump aides who've turned on him don't matter. One who might, though, is former Defense Secretary James Mattis. Several people who know him say he cringes at the notion of a second Trump term, but the four-star Marine general has resisted weighing in on presidential politics.

A few retired Republican office-holders, like conservative Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, will come out against Trump. Others, like former New Hampshire Governor and Senator Judd Gregg, are mortified by this president; in a recent column Gregg said Biden is the antithesis of Trump-- “decent, fair, substantive and well-informed.” But in an interview with me, Gregg suggested the Democratic nominee's leftward lurch concerns him.

The long-shot blockbuster would be George W. Bush.

It's no secret he and Trump have a mutual contempt for one another. If a former Republican president-- the head of an influential Republican brand for decades-- supports a Democratic candidate, it would send shock waves.

It's very unlikely-- but keep an eye on it.

My guess is that yesterday the Lincoln Project released this brand new clip on Brad Parscale, Trump's campaign manger, to make Trumpanzee's ears and eyes bleed. It's a doozy, not so much for the general public as for Trump and his cronies and for #NeverTrumpers everywhere-- and for all times. This has got to be Steve Schmidt's work! Or maybe Schmidt and Weaver. They really want to get under his skin and make him do something idiotic. Would I love to be able to hear Trump's reaction when he sees this one!

Trump is sinking poll numbers for GOP senators and House members. Some of these people were never comfortable with him to begin with. Are they willing to see their careers flushed down the toilet now by backing them? Do they even have any choice? Imagine Maine Senator Susan Collins breaks with Trump. Democrats are unlikely to vote for her but the independent voters who have backed away from her could be wooed back. Probably some Republicans would stick with her but many on the right-- Trump and LePage partisans-- would abandon her. Take Lewiston. There are 23,937 registered voters-- 42.6% Democrats, 34.9% independent and 17.3% Republican. Denouncing Trump would be a good move there. Same in neighboring Auburn (15,463 registered voters-- 39.9% independents, 32.4% Dems, 23.3% Republicans). But what about Caribou and Presque Isle, the two biggest towns in Aroostook County? Caribou's voters are 38.1% independent, 29.9% Democrat and 29.7% Republican. Presque Isle's 6,524 registered voters are 35.5% independent, 31.1% Republican and 29.9% Democrat. The gamble could work there. And statewide? Pew reports that 47% of Maine's voters are Democrats (or independents who lean Democratic), 36% are Republicans and independents who lean Republican and that 17% are independents with no lean. Collins can't afford to lose any significant number of the Republicans, especially with more Democrats than Republicans going to the polls in Maine. Last year "nearly 42,000 more Democrats cast ballots in November than did Republicans-- roughly three times the gaps seen in 2010 and 2014."

In the House just 23 Republicans who are running for reelection have voted with Trump less than 90% of the time. These are them with their Trump scores-- the higher the number the more pro-Trump their voting records:

• Mike Gallagher (WI-08)- 89.9%
• Don Young (AK-al)- 89.8%
• Mo Brooks (AL-05)- 89.7%
• Warren Davidson (OH-08)- 89.7%
• Bill Posey (FL-08)- 89.2%
• Jim Jordan (OH-04)- 88.6%
• Lee Zeldin (NY-01)- 88.2%
• Tom McClintock (CA-04)- 87.3%
• Ken Buck (R-CO)- 87.2%
• Alex Mooney (WV-02)- 87.0%
• Trey Hollingworth (IN-09)- 86.8%
• Paul Gosar (AZ-04)- 86.1%
• Louie Gohmert (TX-01)- 85.7%
• Matt Gaetz (FL-01)- 84.6%
• Andy Biggs (AZ-05)- 82.1%
• Jaime Herrera Beutler (WA-03)- 81.6%
• Fred Upton (MI-06)- 81.5%
• Elise Stefanik (NY-21)- 78.1%
• John Katko (NY-24)- 75.8%
• Thomas Massie (KY-04)- 70.1%
• Chris Smith (NJ-04)- 67.9%
• Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01)- 64.7%
• Jeff Van Drew (NJ-02)- recently switched parties

I don't see any of these members with the guts to break with Trump. The only possibilities might be Massie, who Trump is already against, and Fitzpatrick, whose district is strongly anti-Trump. And remember, most of the 23 members above who have voted "against" Trump have done so because they are further right than Trump, not because they are mainstream conservatives, let alone moderates.