The Story:
The Trump campaign has a new deputy campaign manager, Bill Stepien, a former top advisor to Chris Christie, when Christie was the Governor of New Jersey. Stepien has been brought in at least in part out of a sense that the campaign manager, Brad Parscale, does not have enough experience in national political campaigns and needs a veteran backing him up.
The Background:
Brad Parscale had a much more specialized function last time around: he was the digital media director for the Trump 2016 campaign.
Parscale started a digital marketing business in San Antonio, Texas in 2004. In 2011, he merged this with a similar operation run by Jill Giles, which took the name Giles-Parscale. In 2015, Giles-Parscale was hired to create a website for what was then an exploratory committee for a possible Donald Trump presidential run. Thus began Parscale’s connection with Donald Trump.
The Thing to Know:
In February 2018, the President appointed Parscale to run his re-election campaign. But in recent weeks, pollsters have been indicating that Trump has a tougher row to hoe in order to win re-election than he had thought, and this in turn has strengthened the sense that Parscale at the top of the campaign is not enough. Thus … enter Stepien, stage right.
