President Trump announced a shakeup in his reelection campaign Wednesday night, saying in a social media post that campaign manager Brad Parscale has been demoted and replaced with Bill Stepien.
“I am pleased to announce that Bill Stepien has been promoted to the role of Trump Campaign Manager,” the president announced in a statement posted to Twitter.
Trump said Parscale will remain with the campaign as a senior advisor heading digital and data strategies.
The president said both Parscale and his successor “were heavily involved in our historic 2016 win, and I look forward to having a big and very important second win together.
“This one should be a lot easier as our poll numbers are rising fast, the economy is getting better, vaccines and therapeutics will soon be on the way, and Americans want safe streets and communities!”
A source from Trump’s 2016 campaign told The Post that Stepien “has earned the trust of the president, which is crucial.”
Stepien was appointed as Trump’s deputy campaign manager in May. A veteran Republican operative, he had served as Trump’s national field director in 2016 and later became the White House political director.
Before working for Trump, Stepien, 39, successfully managed both of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s victorious campaigns and was his deputy chief of staff for intergovernmental affairs in between.
But Christie threw Stepien under the bus in January 2014 when e-mails emerged that showed Stepien downplaying the George Washington Bridge feeder-lane closures as they were underway and calling the mayor of Fort Lee “an idiot.”
Christie fired Stepien from his job as a consultant to the Republican Governors Association, which Christie then chaired, and also withdrew his backing for Stepien to take over leadership of the New Jersey GOP.
At the time, Christie said reading Stepien’s e-mails “made me lose my confidence in Bill’s judgment, and you cannot have someone at the top of your political operation that you do not have confidence in.”
Christie remains a trusted confidant to the president and the pair talk regularly, one source said.
Still, Bill Palatucci, national committeeman for the Republican Party of New Jersey, was the one who hired Stepien to guide Christie in 2009 and spoke highly of his appointment on Wednesday night.
“Few have Bill’s deep, national experience and talents which will serve the President well,” he told The Post.
A 2016 campaign source said Trump adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner was behind the decision to install Stepien as campaign chief and selected someone who would be loyal to him.
“Bill is a Jared person as was Brad,” the source said.
The Trump campaign shakeup came about a month after The Post reported the president’s advisors were urging him to replace Parscale.
Several people involved in the reelection effort described Parscale as being checked-out in recent months, with other staffers, including Stepien, shouldering more of the work.
“People within his inner circle continue to question Brad’s ability to bring the campaign down the home stretch because of his inexperience,” one longtime adviser to the president said.
“There’s no strategy, there’s no messaging,” the adviser noted.
One person close to the campaign on Thursday said it had made the right decision in sidelining Parscale and returning him to the digital operation which he spearheaded so successfully in 2016.
“I think it’s a good move to shove him in digital where he belongs. As a campaign manager you’ve got to be a people person, and he wasn’t,” the source said.
Another GOP source said a number of people close to the president had warned him that Parscale was not up to the job, which several insiders described as the toughest role in Washington and akin to being “in the hot seat 24/7.”
The final nail in the coffin is believed to have been Trump’s poorly-attended rally in Tulsa, Okla., last month which was supposed to serve as a comeback for the president after he spent months trapped in the White House amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Parscale boasted online that the campaign had fielded more than a million ticket requests but the event ended up drawing only 6,200 people and an overflow stage the president was supposed to appear at outside the rally was broken down before Trump had arrived in Tulsa.
The source close to the campaign accused Parscale of “messing up Tulsa” and creating a nightmare for Trump.
“It’s a total embarrassment to the president. You can’t do that to the president of the United States,” he said.
“It’s screwed up an entire week of news. It’s unacceptable and that has to fall on Brad’s lap.”