If multiple reports coming out of the campaign are true, then Parscale was more a symptom than a plague on the campaign, though he was a symptom that should have been removed long before this. The real problem appears to be the influence of Jared Kushner, who seems to be guiding a campaign built on appealing to caricatures of conservatives rather than trying to expand the base and get others to vote for him. Trump’s base will not abandon him, but the anti-Clinton vote of 2016 is currently not very motivated to re-elect the President and appears poised to not only oust Trump, but many Senate Republicans.
Kushner is not a deep thinker. He comes from money, has lived with money all his life, and exists in a world that feeds off Trump’s approval. There is no easy way to say it, but if Kushner really is as involved with the campaign as the reports suggest, then he is killing his father-in-law’s chances of re-election.
There is an old trope in Republican circles that you have to win the moderate votes in order to win the presidency. That trope got us moderate Republicans like Mitt Romney and John McCain as presidential candidates. Trump’s victory was not some great coup of that theory, but a signal that the moderates did not want what the Democrats were offering. But now that Trump is up for re-election, he has to convince them to stay with him. Meanwhile, the country is collapsing behind him as he tells us everything’s fine.
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