President Trump attempts to compensate for the failing poll numbers by replacing campaign manager Brad Parscale.
President Trump announced Wednesday night that he is replacing campaign manager Brad Parscale with longtime political aide Bill Stepien as national and swing state polls show him falling further behind presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the presidential race amid a spreading pandemic that has devastated the economy.
The president wrote on social media that Parscale “who has been with me for a long time,” will stay as a senior adviser focusing on digital and data strategies. Parscale has been marginalized in the campaign for several weeks, officials said, with Trump angry about a botched rally in Oklahoma , where far fewer people attended than expected, and his lagging poll numbers.
Stepien was the field director for the 2016 campaign and has worked for the president since the election. He’s known for a low-key style in Trump world and his knowledge of battleground states. He was formerly a top aide to Gov. Chris Christie.
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At 6-foot-8 with a dramatic red beard, Parscale cuts a brash figure and is given to statements such as comparing the Trump campaign to the Death Star, a superweapon in the Star Wars movies.
His strength from the start of the 2016 campaign, in addition to his digital know how, was his close relationship with Trump’s older children. His firm, Parscale Strategy, bills for the campaign salary of Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the wife and girlfriend respectively of Trump’s two oldest sons, Eric and Donald.
Parscale’s standing with the president has been growing shakier since the spring, according to people close to the president who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal dynamics. The underwhelming rally in Tulsa, which failed to meet expectations Parscale had set for Trump, was broadly blamed on the campaign manager.
Pres Trump has spoken ill of Parscale during private meetings
A senior Trump administration official said last week that Parscale “knows he screwed up” but that he maintained the trust of the Trump family.
The president, however, has been more vocal in his frustration with Parscale, and the campaign leadership had begun to shift, with Stepien and other advisers taking an increasing hand in strategy and messaging. The president has regularly criticized Parscale in private meetings.
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Stepien faces a difficult challenge as Parscale’s replacement working for a president who has regularly disregarded campaign advisers recommendations and has seen his approval numbers fall due to his handling of the coronavirus outbreak and racial unrest across the country.
Stepien is expected to conduct an analysis of the campaign and could make changes in the coming weeks, according to people close to the campaign.
This is not the first time Trump has fired a campaign managers. He had three different campaign managers in 2016 before hiring Kellyanne Conway in late summer, who finished the race with Trump and now serves as his counselor in the White House.
The Trump White House was forced to halt its plan to deport international college students who only use online classes to study in the fall. U.S. District Court Judge Allison Burroughs announced the plan during a teleconference hearing.
The decision comes a little over a week after Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that students at schools offering only online courses due to the coronavirus pandemic would need to either leave the US or transfer schools.
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Some with knowledge of the White House, that the President felt the blowback to the proposal with some believing it was poorly executed. The White House is now considering applying the rule to only new students, and not those already in the U.S.
Harvard and MIT sued both DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week, days after the government warned schools it would begin to reinstate tight restrictions on the number of online classes foreign students are allowed to take while they study inside the U.S.
For now, though, the move to drop the policy is a reprieve for more than 1 million international students in the US. In the last week, students had expressed frustration and concern over their next steps, as universities and colleges announced decisions to move all courses online.
Students had already been bracing for the possibility of having to suddenly depart the US or transfer to a university offering a mix of online and in-person courses.
Visa requirements for students have always been strict and coming to the US to take online-only courses has been prohibited. ICE maintained that prohibition in its July 6 guidance, while providing some flexibility for hybrid models, meaning a mix of online and in-person classes.
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“If a school isn’t going to open or if they’re going to be 100% online, then we wouldn’t expect people to be here for that,” acting Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli told CNN’s Brianna Keilar last week.
While many have been paying attention to the news and other major stories. The emphasis is returning to the fact that the government including President Trump bungled the epidemic from the start and may be forced to endure a second shutdown.
If this happens it will mean that we wasted the months and trillion dollars of spending for nothing.
Along those lines I’m looking now at a press release for a Meet the Press interview this morning with Admiral Brett Giroir, a key Trump administration pandemic official. Asked about calls for another shutdown Giroir says: “I don’t think we need to shut down, at least in most places around the country.”
This is obviously meant to push back on the idea. But it is quite revealing that one of the few Trump administration officials the White House still allows to go on TV is himself conceding that it may be necessary in significant portions of the country.
We’re learning more and more about what really drives COVID spread. The problem is that once you have exponential growth in a region you often need to take short-term, drastic action to get the situation under control. Then you can do what he says and be okay: Tight limits on in-door congregation, universal masking, social distancing, much tighter filtration in in-door air ventilation, hand hygiene. The problem is that what can keep spread in check can’t necessarily get it under control when it’s in growing exponentially – or at least not nearly quick enough.
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This is the tragedy of our catastrophically bungled national response. We were supposed to use the lockdown, achieved at such immense sacrifice, to make all this possible. We didn’t. Not in most of the country.
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So the U.S. Supreme Court wrapped up its term today with a big decision. It ruled 7-to-2 that New York prosecutor has the legal right to subpoena President Trump’s tax returns. A second decision said Congress doesn’t have that right, at least in this moment under these circumstances. At a high level, the court found the president of the United States does not have absolute immunity from investigation while in office.
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In a 7-to-2 decision like you said, Chief Justice John Roberts basically determined that the grand jury in New York state had the ability to issue a subpoena for President Trump’s personal financial records, including almost 10 years of his tax returns. That rejected an argument from Trump’s personal lawyers and the solicitor general of the Justice Department that would have allowed Trump to basically use the White House as a shield for any of those requests for his personal information. And just to be clear, this is his personal stuff, not any kind of executive privilege-based materials or decision-making that he did in the White House. It’s his money stuff.
They were both decided by 7-to-2, both opinions written by Chief Justice John Roberts. The first decision, the one that says that presidents aren’t blanket immune, it involved the Manhattan district attorney.
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The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, had issued a subpoena through a grand jury for almost 10 years of Trump’s financial records and tax returns. And they started this investigation after Michael Cohen, a familiar name, Trump’s former personal lawyer, testified to Congress that he had helped pay hush money to women during the 2016 campaign to keep them quiet as Trump was running toward the presidency. That led investigators to wonder what was going on with Trump – in the Trump Organization books and records, and so they wanted access to these materials. Today the Supreme Court said the grand jury is very likely to get them, basically said there is a public interest in fair and effective law enforcement that cuts in favor of access to evidence even when it’s concerning personal records of the president of the United States.
Still will be awhile before the documents are made public
That grand jury is still not likely to get these documents for a while. Under a grand jury process all of that material is super-secret. And it’s against the law to leak any of that stuff. So if you’re found leaking, you could be charged with a crime and put in the clink. That said, the majority decision basically said President Trump can still raise some other arguments, basically that these subpoenas are overbroad or there are other problems with them. But the ringing endorsement from this majority ruling is that the president is not above the law, and it’s quite likely this grand jury is going to get those materials, although maybe not before the November election.
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Because on one hand, I’m seeing this and saying you can, and then you can’t. And Congress clearly has generally the power to investigate, to oversee. I was just amazed as I was reading this second ruling. It’s called Mazars after President Trump’s accounting firm. And Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority again, seemed like he was kind of walking through a minefield. He pointed out that the high court had never been asked to rule on a case like this, which is basically a tug-of-war or a wrestling match between the Congress and the White House over access to these kinds of materials. And he seemed to really not like it, this clash between rival branches of government, he said.
But basically, John Roberts laid out this new test that lawmakers Congress and congressional committees are going to have to go through to show that they really need some of these kinds of materials. And that might make it harder for Congress in the future to get some of these documents in a timely manner.
Justice Roberts appears to reigning in Congress
I guess that’s surprising to me because I feel like so many of the rulings coming out of the Roberts court, especially when they had to do with, you know, the administration issues, boil down to Congress has power to do things; if only it would do them. So here they seem to be saying, rein yourself in a little bit, Congress.
Tom Hungar, who had been the general counsel of the House of Representatives and earlier spent a lot of time in the solicitor general’s office, issued a statement today saying he thought this was a major strategy error by the House of Representatives and it would hurt congressional investigations moving forward.
He’s not happy. You know, he’s not happy with the way this – these decisions, you know, came out. He’s sent, like, you know, a flurry of tweets basically saying that, you know, he was being treated the way no other president is being treated. He said that normally presidents get deference, but not me – in all-caps. What you hear from the campaign is – what they are saying is President Trump has released a lot of documents about his financial records and so that this really doesn’t matter and that, you know, his personal lawyer Jay Sekulow was saying that they look forward to, you know, raising other constitutional issues at these lower courts to continue to fight this.
I think a big question is how President Trump handles this going forward and whether he’s going to let it go or whether he’s going to continue to talk about it. It seems likely, based on history, that he will continue to kind of gripe about it for a while.The president is frustrated with the court, but it was two of his nominees, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, who voted against him in that key case.
President Trump seeing Gorsuch and Kavanaugh as traitors
President Trump didn’t specifically mention Kavanaugh or Gorsuch. But we know that Trump looks at every – almost everything through a very personal lens. And you know, he often goes, I did this for you; you owe me some loyalty. So I can’t imagine that he is going to be happy that Kavanaugh and Gorsuch went against him on this. There was some talk when Kavanaugh was nominated that part of the reason that he was nominated was because of this idea that he would be more deferential to presidential powers. And – but that did not help him in this case.
Ahead of this ruling, there was a lot of talk about how it might fit into these past big Supreme Court moments, where the court ruled with unanimous majorities that presidential power is not unlimited.
I think it very much keeps in line with those decisions. The two that I’m most familiar with involve President Nixon and having to turn over some of the tapes that he made in the Oval Office. That was a unanimous decision from the high court. And then the second was during the Bill Clinton administration, the notion that he would be subject to a civil lawsuit over behavior that occurred before he was president of the United States. In both those cases, unanimous courts ruled that the president is a special person, but he can’t get away with having to answer for some conduct. And this opinion in the New York grand jury case very much fits in that line.
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A lot of Democrats very much want to see President Trump’s tax returns. He was the first presidential nominee in more than a generation to never release them publicly. They’re still taking it as a win. You had former Vice President Joe Biden. Biden tweeted this video that he had done a while back, and the video basically says put out your taxes, Trump, or shut up. And you know – so he’s basically challenging Trump. And I think we can expect to see that going forward – more of that from him because Biden, of course, has released his taxes.
Pelosi said she’s willing to follow Supreme Court rulings
From Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, she basically said that, you know, they are going to take the standards that were put forth by the Supreme Court that Congress has to meet to, you know, get information to satisfy their subpoenas – that they feel like they can meet those standards and that they’re going to move ahead with trying to get this information. But like you said, it’s not going to happen before the election.
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I feel like today’s ruling really underscores this theme of the close of this term, of Chief Justice John Roberts really seeming to try to make a political point that the court is not political and also, once again, underscoring the importance of the letter of the law. Well, you know, he had come out and said in the last couple of years that there are no such thing as Obama judges and Trump judges. And certainly, the lineup in today’s cases in particular, with respect to executive power and congressional oversight, would give some credence to his argument that you can’t always predict how a justice is going to vote based on the president who appointed them.
He handled some immigrants’ rights cases and abortion rights cases this year. He handled a bunch of other cases about civil rights. And he tried to walk a fine and narrow line. At some point, that’s going to get harder and harder to do in the future. I certainly know this. He’s a guy who’s in desperate need of a break right now. So it’s a good thing they’re on break for the summer.
The courts are such a big selling point for conservatives for President Trump. You know, he trumpets them all the time. He talks about all the judges appointed. He talks about Kavanaugh and Gorsuch.
President Trump still has a record that he can point to for appointing so many conservative judges. There were big wins, you know, even just this week on, you know, religious freedom, you know, when it came to contraception and things of that nature. So he does have things that he can point to and that I think conservatives can point to that they have gotten from the judiciary. And I think what they are looking at is a very long-term goal of remaking the whole judiciary and that this will come and pay dividends down the line.
So I think that’s an argument that he still has. And these issues, especially about the tax returns and stuff like that, was very specific to President Trump and to him as a candidate and not necessarily – I don’t think you can really extrapolate that to just a larger conservative ideology.
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We’re now down to little more than two months before school starts in most of the country and a great many districts, if not necessarily most, are yet to announce definitive plans for how they are going to conduct school in the Fall semester. Indeed, the entire subject of school closures and openings is another example of a country trapped in magical thinking, yet another permutation of the “reopening” debate.
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How do you prevent your home from flooding? The biggest thing is to make sure there’s no flood near your house. Fix the levees or the dam. If you don’t, your house is going to be toast no matter what clever ideas or plans you come up with. We’ve seen from other parts of the world that you can reopen schools. But it’s not a matter of any particularly clever strategies. It’s just something that becomes possible once the prevalence of the disease gets really low. And it doesn’t ‘get’ low. You make it low.
The clear lesson from Europe and East Asia is that you need to get the prevalence of COVID down really, really low. Once you’ve done that lots of things become possible. People in those countries are still doing mitigation and wearing masks and social distancing. But they’ve been able to resume a reasonable level of social and economic life because they got cases really, really low. Like I said, if the water is ten feet deep on your street, you’re going to need to get a new house.
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Here we’ve been focused on these absurd “reopening” debates that are both highly politicized and highly hypothetical while the actual case counts are exploding in much of the country. Can we have schools open in September? It’s an entirely moot point unless you have cases low enough that you’re not contending with having to do another total shutdown.
From start to first we’ve treated ‘reopening’ as a parlor game or political conflict or a subject for debate as opposed to something you start doing once you’ve wrestled the disease into some kind of submission. And that is quite simply a joke.
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