Donald Trump makes bizarre move to try to keep yet another Trump-Russia figure from flipping on him
The story has gotten a bit lost in the shuffle today in the wake of the explosive story of Jared Kushner’s security clearance being revoked, and Hope Hicks turning against Donald Trump. But it’s nonetheless a crucial development, and not at all for the reasons on the surface. Trump has, incredibly, hired a new “campaign manager” for his (thus far imaginary) 2020 reelection campaign. The identity of this new manager is as surprising as it is revealing.
Trump has announced that Brad Parscale will be his campaign manager in the 2020 election. As we’ve pointed out in the past, we can’t stress enough that there is no Trump 2020 reelection campaign. He’s merely using this ruse as an excuse to fundraise money, which he’s in turn been using to pay his own and his family’s legal bills in the Trump-Russia scandal. If Trump is somehow still in office by 2020, and if he does decide to seek reelection, that’ll be an entirely different thing than his current pretend reelection campaign. But it’s nonetheless significant that he’s already naming Parscale as his new campaign manager.
Brad Parscale was Donald Trump’s data director during the 2016 campaign. He’s the one who hired the Steve Bannon-connected company Cambridge Analytica to handle the campaign’s voter data analysis. Though it hasn’t been proven, there are many who suspect Cambridge Analytica was using voter registration data that was hacked and stolen by the Russians and then delivered to the Trump campaign. Parscale was also a close ally of Jared Kushner during the campaign.
Trump threw Kushner under the bus today by revoking his security clearance, essentially leaving him with no real job in the White House going forward. This appears to be a sign that Trump thinks Kushner is about to cut a plea deal against him. Bannon recently spilled his guts to Robert Mueller. Now suddenly Trump is making a point of elevating Parscale, an ally of Kushner and Bannon, even as he thinks Kushner and Bannon are trying to take him down.
It’s not difficult to put together that Donald Trump is trying to keep Brad Parscale from flipping on him, at a time when he believes Parscale’s buddies are flipping on him. This doesn’t mean Parscale committed any crimes. But it does mean that Trump believes Parscale knows where all the Trump-Russia bodies are buried, and he’s desperately trying to keep Parscale in the fold, even as everyone else is selling out to save themselves
