Trump just demoted his campaign manager. Watch the weird personal attack ad that helped do him in

Trump just demoted Brad Parscale, his controversial, high-profile campaign manager; Republican political operative Bill Stepien has landed the top job, while Parscale has been handed a “senior advisor” title as a consolation prize. As Fox News notes in “Trump replaces campaign manager Brad Parscale, as polls show Biden ahead,” The move announced Wednesday night came days after an article in The Washington Post portrayed Parscale as self-promoting and aloof, noting that he featured prominently in an early Trump campaign ad—and that staffers complained he often took calls by his swimming pool at home. But the recent bad press—the WaPo story is headlined “Trump frustrated with campaign manager Parscale amid falling polls”—isn’t the half of it. There’s been a whisper campaign surrounding Parscale and his possible fate for months. As Ad Age noted in May, he raised eyebrows by taking to Twitter to liken the campaign operation he’d been building to the Death Star: For nearly three years we have been building a juggernaut campaign (Death Star). It is firing on all cylinders. Data, Digital, TV, Political, Surrogates, Coalitions, etc. In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time. pic.twitter.com/aJgCNfx1m0— Brad Parscale (@parscale) May 7, 2020 That tone-deaf comparison earned social media ridicule at the time—and again Wednesday night in the wake of his demotion: Someone tell Brad Parscale that the Death Star blows up at the end. https://t.co/XTC9qpoeIf— Nick Jack Pappas (@Pappiness) July 16, 2020 The Death Star's main characteristics are defined by being so impractical and based around boosting the ego of the nationalists building it that it's design is littered with faults lending to its swift destruction https://t.co/fbKDfo1Xxb— Quinton Reviews 🎬 (@Q_Review) July 16, 2020 On May 20, 13 days after Parscale’s initial “Death Star” tweet, the conservative PAC The Lincoln Project released an attack ad titled “GOP Cribs” (below) focused entirely on the posh lifestyle enabled by Parscale’s reportedly lavish pay package. “We go after things that we know Donald Trump is sensitive to,” Rick Wilson, a co-founder of The Lincoln Project,” told The Washington Post. “He doesn’t like people to be bigger than him, and he doesn’t like people to make money off him. The anti-Parscale attack ad has run up 975,409 views, as of this writing, on YouTube alone. To put that in context, “Biden stands up for China,” an attack ad directed at Joe Biden and released by the official Donald J. Trump YouTube channel on April 9, has 513,151 views. Meanwhile, last night The Lincoln Project tweeted this, um, tribute to Brad Parscale: Pour one out for @Parscale. pic.twitter.com/dfkGWG0U9P— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 16, 2020

Trump just demoted his campaign manager. Watch the weird personal attack ad that helped do him in

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