Is Donald Trump going to fire another campaign adviser now?

| 9:00 pm EDT July 19, 2020
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When Donald Trump “demoted” campaign manager Brad Parscale this week (translation: fired him but kept him on the payroll to keep him quiet), it was the correct move. Parscale is a hapless idiot. But we all know Trump didn’t do it for the right reasons; he did it because he needed a scapegoat after he kept falling flat on his face as a candidate.

Now Trump has fallen on his face in particularly humiliating fashion, after making a totally unforced error. Trump can get a puff piece of an interview out of Fox News any time he wants. He simply has to stick to the prime time hosts who like to prop him up. But instead Trump decided to sit down with Chris Wallace this morning. Wallace ate him for breakfast, just like Palmer Report and a lot of others predicted.

What’s remarkable is that Trump probably couldn’t have made a worse choice of interviewer. If he’d chosen Rachel Maddow, she’d also have eaten him alive, but at least his fans wouldn’t have seen it, because it would have been on MSNBC. Trump’s choice of Chris Wallace meant that he got humiliated, and some of his own fans saw it happen.

We can’t imagine that any of Trump’s advisers are dumb enough to have actually told him to do the Chris Wallace show. They’re dumb but they’re not that dumb. Donald Trump probably insisted on doing the interview because he thought he could best Wallace, even as his advisers tried to talk him out of it. After all, they know many if not most of Trump’s marbles are gone.

Yet Trump isn’t going to blame himself for the mistake; he’s not psychologically capable of it. Someone will have to be scapegoated. Maybe Trump can convince himself that Parscale is somehow at fault for the decision to sit down with Wallace. Or will Trump have to fire someone else just to feel good about the mistake he made?