Monthly Archives: September 2019

By Christopher B. Daly

Memo to the national political press corps:

Who is Brad Parscale?

If you are a member of the national press corps covering the 2020 election, chances are you know who he is. If not, the chances are pretty much nil.

Brad Parscale is Donald Trump’s campaign manager. He should be covered every day, because he is almost certainly up to something every day. But most voters do not know what he’s up to, and chances are that they will never find out — until it’s too late.

One thing Brad Parscale has been up to recently is waging a campaign to get the states to shut down their Republican primaries, so Donald Trump will not have to face any challengers. Instead, Parscale wants to spare Trump the expense of mounting a primary campaign and spare Trump the need to defend his policies against actual conservative critics.

Voters could be excused for not knowing that Trump is opposed in his own party by at least three candidates: former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, and former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh. They recently co-wrote an oped that ran in the Washington Post complaining that Trump’s high-handedness was depriving Republican voters of choice.

“In the Trump era, personal responsibility, fiscal sanity and rule of law have been overtaken by a preference for alienating our allies while embracing terrorists and dictators, attacking the free press and pitting everyday Americans against one another,” they wrote. “No surprise, then, that the latest disgrace, courtesy of Team Trump, is an effort to eliminate any threats to the president’s political power in 2020. Republicans have long held primaries and caucuses to bring out the best our party has to offer. Our political system assumes an incumbent president will make his case in front of voters to prove that he or she deserves to be nominated for a second term.”

This is exactly the kind of thing that the national political press corps should be covering. If you are covering something that Donald Trump wants you to cover (like his hostile threats against Iran), you are probably covering the wrong thing.