Inside the most disorganized, unscrupulous, self-sabotaging presidential campaign since the last one. Olivianuzzi reports on Trump 2020
President Trump speaking in Cleveland on August 6. Photo: JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES For the two and a half years that he was in charge, a Brad Parscale sighting was always news at Trump campaign headquarters in Rosslyn, Virginia. Parscale is six-foot-eight with a dagger of a beard and thorns for ears that give his head the shape of a spiked club, like a medieval morning star. So you can’t really miss him.
It was July before he “saw for the first time” that he could be defeated, according to the 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.
“The president wonders who’s truly loyal to him and who’s not and who’s making a buck on him,” George Conway told me, explaining that, from his perspective, “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.
In the weeks that followed, Stepien was described to me by multiple members of the staff as a professional guy who cared only about winning the election — as though the arrival of a campaign manager who cared about winning was a notable development for a campaign on track to lose. “There are more corporate expectations of clocking in and clocking out,” a person close to the campaign and the White House told me. “Overnight, the expectations changed.
Anyone with power or obvious ambitions to obtain it necessarily has rivals in Trumpworld. And Parscale’s close relationship with the president’s son-in-law meant he assumed the role of mark for Jared Kushner’s many haters. From Parscale’s perspective, there was an entire community of people on the outside who seemed to spend every day, every hour, every second vibrating with contempt for people — like him — who had real influence and real relationships with the people who actually mattered.
“I do think it’s shitty that people are out trying to make Brad look bad to make themselves look better,” the source close to the White House and the campaign said. “We’re supposed to be all on the same team.” This person added, “It’s always this unspoken thing. Everybody knows who’s saying and doing things. So that’s really the shady thing. Like, Don’t do your dirty work in the media. Don’t be a coward. But eventually, these people show themselves, and karma’s a bitch.
Senior adviser Jared Kushner. Photo-Illustration: EVAN VUCCI/AP PHOTO/Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved The shopping mall on Paxton Church Road was deserted. Pugliese Brothers , Enviro-Master Services , Sports Paradise , O.C. Canvas Studio , Bagel Lovers , and Little Owls Knit Shop were all closed.
When she first thought I might be one, she was friendly. She offered me coffee and asked me to sit down. Two people had signed up for the Trump Leadership Initiative training, she said, but each of them had canceled, one citing an ear infection and the other citing allergies. When she learned I was a member of the media, her face hardened. She returned her gaze to her computer and told me she wasn’t permitted to speak to the press.
The second event had been listed with an apparent misspelling in the street name, a detail that prompted the girl with the lilac hair to laugh.“I’m sorry!” the other woman said, and she seemed to mean it. “If you want to leave us your card, we can make sure to invite you to our events in the future!”
People who know Stepien tend to use the phrases “intensely private” and “hard to read” when they discuss him. He is the anti–Brad Parscale, according to officials who have worked with both men: “linear” instead of “scatterbrained,” deliberate rather than emotional, and — most of all — uncomfortable with the spotlight.
His beliefs were besides the point: “He didn’t care if every Republican in the state lost — as long as his guy won. He was a Republican by virtue of his environment. He held the right in considerable disdain. I would say he was fairly centrist — but he wasn’t driven by ideology. He never was. Politics was a sport for him. Had his first opportunity been to work for a Democrat, he’d be a Democrat.”
By the third or fourth interview of the day in which a Trump campaign official argues, with what sounds like sincerity, that not only are the polls all wrong, they are wrong owing to intentional malpractice on the part of major polling institutions and their partnered major media outlets, and not only are they wrong but, actually, polls don’t even matter, because there is a silent majority of American voters who fear telling surveyors what they really believe and because the polls were wrong in...
With the exception of the time Vice-President Mike Pence came to visit, there had never been a meeting at HQ that included the entire staff — and Stepien noticed this. He is, you could say, the kind of guy who likes meetings. He planned to hold all-hands meetings every week for the rest of the campaign. The first would be the morning after his promotion was announced.
The idea had always been for Bill Stepien to run a presidential race — but it was supposed to be Chris Christie’s. In the three years between Election Night in Asbury Park and Election Night in Trump Tower, however, all did not go as planned for the boss or his broker.
A second person close to the Christie administration said, “Christie just killed him. He didn’t even have the balls to call him.” Christie asked DuHaime to tell Stepien about his decision, this person said. “DuHaime brought Stepien to the dance. To make DuHaime do that was just awful.” “Bringing Bill into the Trump circle in 2016 was a slap in the face to Chris Christie,” one of the people close to the Christie administration said. “Like, ‘Okay, Christie, you’re irrelevant, and I’m gonna pick your guy who is no longer your guy.’ ”
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