Election 2020

Trump’s “Death Star” Goes Boom

Written by SK Ashby

Trump's poll numbers are very bad, to say the least, and the last week saw some of his worst numbers yet with almost no poll showing him down by less than 10 points nationally and some showing him down by 15 or more.

Now, Democrats are urged to ignore the polls and behave as if Biden is down, but Trump isn't ignoring them.

Trump is keenly aware that he's losing ground across he board and, to that end, he has replaced his campaign manager Brad Parscale; the architect of Trump's "Death Star."

The move comes amid falling poll numbers and mounting worries over the president’s political prospects, with Trump himself expressing concern that he’s losing to Joe Biden. Parscale has been under the microscope in recent weeks, particularly following Trump’s half-capacity rally in Tulsa, Okla. Parscale was blamed internally for the rally after boasting beforehand that over 1 million people had signed up to attend. In private, the president repeatedly criticized Parscale for the episode.

First of all, calling Trump's digital campaign operation the "Death Star" was always foolish. The Death Star was destroyed -- twice! -- and yet somehow comparing the two was still an insult to the Death Star. Parscale's Office of Facebook Memes didn't scare anyone the way a planet-killing laser would.

But I'm not writing this just to riff on the Trump campaign's poorly conceived comparisons to Star Wars lore.

The reason Parscale got the job to begin with was not because he was ever particularly bright or good. Parscale ran Trump's digital operation in 2016, but that's not why Trump won at the electoral college. Parscale had help from multiple foreign regimes including Russia in 2016 and Trump also benefited from an entire lifetime of misogyny directed at Hillary Clinton in the media.

Trump gave the job to Parscale in 2020 because he wanted to recreate the magic of 2016, but it's not happening this time. If there are any foreign campaigns to help Trump currently in operation, they're nowhere near the scale we saw in 2016 and one of their key distribution channels, Facebook, has been thoroughly discredited.

Parscale's downfall is partially his own fault because the truth is he's actually an idiot who was recently outwitted by teenagers on TikTok, but Trump was a fool for elevating him in the first place.

The word is that this ad from the Lincoln Project also got under Trump's skin.