Monday, August 17, 2020

WHY DEMETRIO IGNACIO-FLORES' WIFE WILL NOT VOTE FOR KAMALA HARRIS: SHE'S DEAD.

 

Illegal Alien Wanted for Allegedly Murdering Wife Found Living in Virginia

CCSO
CCSO
2:07

An illegal alien wanted for allegedly murdering his wife was found living in the Richmond, Virginia, area by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

Demetrio Ignacio-Flores, a 38-year-old illegal alien from Mexico, has been wanted in his native Oaxaca, Mexico, for allegedly murdering his wife in 2010. A decade later, ICE agents found Ignacio-Flores living in the Richmond area under a false identity.

Ignacio-Flores was first encountered by U.S. Border Patrol in April 2011 near Laredo, Texas, and was voluntarily returned to Mexico. Some time thereafter, ICE officials say Ignacio-Flores returned illegally to the U.S. by crossing the border.

Despite being wanted by Mexican officials on murder charges, Ignacio-Flores was able to live in Richmond under a false identity for at least six years. In 2014, Ignacio-Flores was convicted of drunk driving and twice driving without a license but was never turned over to ICE agents.

“This is the perfect example of why someone with low-level convictions should be turned over to ICE,” ICE official Lyle Boelens said in a statement. “Even though Ignacio-Flores hadn’t been convicted of any high-level crimes in the U.S., he is wanted in his native country for murder.”

The Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office does not hold illegal aliens for ICE when a detainer is issued, instead requesting that federal immigration officials provide a court order. The policy has put Chesterfield County on the Center for Immigration Studies’ sanctuary jurisdiction map since 2014.

It is unclear if ICE had placed a detainer on Ignacio-Flores after his convictions in 2014.

Ignacio-Flores is currently in ICE custody and is awaiting immigration proceedings before a judge with the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

Immigration?  Even as the daughter of (legal) immigrants from India and Jamaica, Kamala has repeatedly shown that she makes no distinction between the rights and privileges of a citizen and an illegal alien.  Benefits, she claims, belong to citizens and non-citizens alike.

With Choice of Kamala Harris, Biden's Immigration Plans Become Clearer: Expect parole in place before an amnesty — including for criminal aliens


By Andrew R. Arthur 
Joe Biden's choice of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) as his running mate has made his path to implement a massive amnesty for millions of aliens living in the United States much clearer. Expect a massive "parole in place" (PIP) before an equally massive legalization storm — including for criminal aliens.

 

KAMALA HARRIS AND AMNESTY FOR 40 MILLION MEXICAN FLAG WAVERS SO THEY MAY LEGALLY BRING UP THE REST OF MEXICO AND VOTE DEM FOR MORE

 

Immigration?  Even as the daughter of (legal) immigrants from India and Jamaica, Kamala has repeatedly shown that she makes no distinction between the rights and privileges of a citizen and an illegal alien.  Benefits, she claims, belong to citizens and non-citizens alike.

With Choice of Kamala Harris, Biden's Immigration Plans Become Clearer: Expect parole in place before an amnesty — including for criminal aliens


By Andrew R. Arthur 
Joe Biden's choice of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) as his running mate has made his path to implement a massive amnesty for millions of aliens living in the United States much clearer. Expect a massive "parole in place" (PIP) before an equally massive legalization storm — including for criminal aliens.

 

 

Kamala Has Already Struck Out

By Janice Shaw Crouse

Even before the Democrat presidential candidate, Joe Biden, named his choice for vice president, a group of Democrat Party activists released an unprecedented document outlining their "rules" for how the media could address issues surrounding the woman Biden ultimately chose.  These guidelines made it abundantly clear that the media were "required" to handle Biden's choice with kid gloves.  Questions were not to be probing; instead, this veep candidate, unlike the vicious coverage Sarah Palin endured years ago, was to be above questioning.  With astounding hubris, the Democrats actually warned the media that they would "monitor coverage" of the female veep candidate and that anything even slightly critical would be condemned as "racist and sexist."  Hollywood celebrities and the usual line-up of leftist women's groups (NARAL, Planned Parenthood, etc.) have promised Kamala, "We've got your back."

Bottom line: Biden is in hiding; Kamala is untouchable.

This mafia-style intimidation cannot be allowed to stand.  The public needs to know that Kamala's quest, as in baseball, has already struck out.  She has three strikes against her that are a death knell for her prospects. There is no way, after these strikes, she should be anywhere near a heartbeat or a brain flare away from the presidency of America.

1. Opportunistic Career Path — We are not supposed to have noticed (or it's not supposed to make a difference or matter), but Kamala Harris came into politics as a mistress under the patronage of the notoriously unethical speaker of the House in California, Willie Brown.  Numerous public servants in government in California at the time noted that Kamala was a pretty twenty-something young woman that Brown, a married man in his 60s, regularly showed off as his mistress at political events.  She received prestigious, powerful, and profitable political appointments in state government and moved on from there.  Anyone who brings up this opportunism is against her "ambition" and is trying to keep her "in her place."  In short, anyone raising these well documented facts is both misogynistic and racist.

Kamala is known as being "pragmatic, rather than principled."  Some Democrat strategists claim to be happy with Kamala as a "messenger" (meaning she is good TV) but cringe at her inconsistent and problematic "messages" (meaning she is all over the map on any given issue).

Harris has flip-flopped on issue after issue, depending on what's politically expedient.  She excuses this inconsistency by saying being a prosecutor is, by its very nature, "controversial."  As a prosecutor, she defended capital punishment, but she ran for office on an "anti–death penalty" platform.  Her truancy policies were a problem; also her drug programs.  She opposed police body cameras, claiming they disadvantaged blacks and minorities.  She was criticized for siding with police too often; now she is vocal about police "brutality."  She is now very pro-LGBT and transgender issues and blames her previous inconsistency on staffers who disregarded her personal views.  She was against decriminalization of "sex work" before she suddenly advocated for criminalization.  Same with marijuana; she was against it before flippantly claiming that marijuana brings joy and "we need more joy in the world."  She's taken both sides on whether a convicted terrorist should be able to vote from prison!

2. Radical Woke Ideologies and Policies — Many analysts believe that Kamala Harris will be America's most radical left political candidate ever.  She's consistently among the top two "most progressive" members of the Senate.  She has been called one of the most radical-left politicians today; pick any pet woke cause, and Kamala will be farthest left!  These policy positions are not only constitutionally problematic; they are also prohibitively expensive, with a price tag in the multiple billions of dollars!

Guns?  Kamala supports extremist laws to restrict our 2nd Amendment rights.  She advocates a wide array of increased gun control measures, including executive orders to implement problematic regulations.

Health care?  Kamala co-sponsored Bernie Sanders's "Medicare for All" health insurance proposal.  She wants to abolish all private health insurance, saying, "Let's eliminate all of that!"  She strongly supports a single-payer system.  Observers note that both her position and Biden's on the issue have solidified during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Education?  Kamala attended all-white schools until she chose to attend Howard University.  She passed the bar in 1990 and progressed as a prosecutor to become district attorney of San Francisco thanks to political muscle from her benefactor, Willie Brown.  She advocates for free college and university education for all — especially for free tuition at historically black colleges and universities.

Immigration?  Even as the daughter of (legal) immigrants from India and Jamaica, Kamala has repeatedly shown that she makes no distinction between the rights and privileges of a citizen and an illegal alien.  Benefits, she claims, belong to citizens and non-citizens alike.

Environment?  She joined forces with the socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to require additional regulations on environmental policies.

3. Kavanaugh Hearings Debacle — The final strike is the most disgraceful.  The way Kamala Harris treated Brett Kavanaugh at the 2018 confirmation hearings was the most disrespectful and vicious of the senators.  She stood out at the hearings for her deceitful questioning and the revolting tone of her accusations.  She accepted the flimsiest of evidence in attacking Kavanaugh – for instance, the implausible and unsubstantiated accusation of gang rape — and praised an obviously "deceptively edited video" claiming that Kavanaugh opposed birth control, claiming that it was all about "punishing women."

Her extreme positions were so bad that she was actually called out by the left. Her attacks — called fear-invoking lies and possibly attempts at a presidential audition — were acknowledged as false and criticized by left-wing PolitiFact and her liberal hometown newspapers, The San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times.  As President Trump said, she was, indeed, "extraordinarily nasty" to Brett Kavanaugh.

Guy Benson, Townhall political editor, described her Kavanaugh performance as "particularly demagogic, cynical and abysmal."  In their excellent book, Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court, Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino detailed all the egregious procedural maneuvers Harris tried in her efforts to get Kavanaugh to commit perjury, as well as the fawning media coverage.

In a normal election, the veep choice would be relatively irrelevant, but Joe Biden is not a normal presidential candidate.  At 77, "Gaffe-Prone Joe" Biden has said he'd be a "transitional" president, and it is generally acknowledged that he is more likely than other previous candidates to become (sooner rather than later) incapacitated or unable to serve more than one term.  Thus, Kamala must be viewed as a possible presidential contender.  She fails on every measure — significantly!  Leadership?  She is obviously, much like Hillary, a ruthless opportunist willing to do or say whatever it takes to get ahead.  Ideas/Policies?  She can be swayed however the political winds are blowing at the time.  Even her friends explain that she is "not ideological," meaning she doesn't take principled stances on important issues.  Experience?  She has dramatically failed upward!  The media have frequently acknowledged her "history of flip flopping and deceit."

What Kamala Harris offers in the veepstakes is a promise to promote a grab bag of assorted radical goals of every oddball progressive from Bernie to AOC to Obama and be an advocate for special constituencies — pro-abortion voters, instigators of the BLM movement's racism, gun control activists, and illegal aliens.

Image: Mobilus In Mobili via Wikimedia Commons.

 


WHICH WOULD BE CHEAPER? BUILD THE WALL AGAINST NARCOMEX OR PUT EMPLOYERS OF ILLEGALS IN PRISONS BUILT ALONG THE OPEN NARCOMEX BORDER?

 

Going after the Employers of Illegal Aliens


By Mark Krikorian
National Review, August 10, 2020


Excerpt: Simply arresting a bunch of illegals, and leaving it at that, is both unjust and ineffective. Unjust because it lets the other participant in the criminal transaction off the hook, and ineffective because employers can just hire another batch of illegal aliens and essentially write off the disruption as a cost of doing business.

KAMALA HARRIS - SHADY LAWYER AND SHADY PROSECUTOR AS TAX PAYERS PAID HER WAY

Kamala Harris: Mike Nifong in a Dress

By Civis Americanus

While the Black Lives Matter movement is a fraud whose principal agendas include "revolution" and an anti-Trump campaign on 501(c)(3) tax-exempt money, the overwhelming majority of Americans support the ostensible causes behind which it hides.  These include opposition to police misconduct, which includes not just excessive force, but also imprisonment of innocent people, many of whom are black.  This makes Kamala Harris exactly what everybody is protesting.

Over-Aggressive Prosecutors Are More Dangerous than Most Criminals

An over-aggressive prosecutor is far more dangerous to society than any but the most violent criminals.  If a thug invades your home to rob, rape, or murder you, you can shoot him, and the law will be on your side when you do it.  A prosecutor can, on the other hand, force you to spend your life savings to defend your freedom and good name and maybe even send you to prison for something you didn't do.  Consequences for the prosecutor are rare, although disgraced Duke Lacrosse prosecutor Mike Nifong (D-N.C.) is an exception.  Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) has been involved in similarly questionable prosecutions, although in a position of supervisory responsibility rather than direct participation.

People believe that a jury trial is similar to the one in Twelve Angry Men, in which one juror convinced the others to examine the evidence thoroughly and discover reasonable doubts.  What aggressive prosecutors really want are twelve people who are too stupid to get out of jury duty, will believe and do whatever they are told, and will rubber-stamp the prosecutor's decision to send somebody to prison or even the death chamber.  George Stinney was, for example, a black teenager who was executed at age 14 on the basis of evidence that would not convince any intelligent person.

The Amiraults were convicted, and far more recently, on the basis of evidence such as a magic room, a secret room, and an evil robot, none of which was ever found but for which the jury took the prosecution's word.  There were also allegations of sexual abuse with a butcher knife that somehow left no injuries whatsoever.  Superior Court judge Isaac Borenstein, who presided over the trial, opined, "Every trick in the book had been used to get the children to say what the investigators wanted" and, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, added that "[t]he children's accounts were tainted by suggestive interviewing techniques and were coerced by investigators who refused to take a denial of abuse as an answer."  Scott Harshbarger (D-Mass.) and Martha Coakley (D-Mass.) then ran for higher offices, as Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is doing today.

Trying to railroad an innocent person to prison is professional misconduct for which a prosecutor can be censured, suspended, or even disbarred.  "The prosecutor in a criminal case shall refrain from prosecuting a charge that the prosecutor knows is not supported by probable cause."  The prosecutor is also obliged to disclose exculpatory evidence.  Enforcement of these rules is rare, noting the junk cases now being brought against motorists who defend themselves against carjackers while the carjackers go free and against police officers who shoot violent assailants.

Mike Nifong was among the rare exceptions because "Nifong kept from the defense DNA test results that found genetic material from several men in the accuser's underwear and body, but none from any lacrosse player."  The Democratic Party's vice presidential candidate — and Joe Biden's age means she could easily become president — comes across as just more of the same.  "Comes across" is emphatically an opinion based on the references shown below as opposed to any kind of proven fact, but voters have the right to choose based on informed opinions.

Mike Nifong in a Dress

"Kamala Harris Was Not a 'Progressive Prosecutor'" by Lara Bazelon, former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent, is highly instructive.  It appeared in the leftist New York Times, so the Democrats cannot denounce it as a right-wing smear job.  The article alleges, "Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors."  "Judge rips Harris' office for hiding problems" provides additional detail.  These articles do not even hint that Harris did these things herself, but, as the person in charge, the buck stops with her.

Harris also "refused to allow newly available DNA testing for a black man [Kevin Cooper] convicted of hacking to death a beautiful white family and young neighbor," although she later changed her mind.  The Innocence Project stipulates that Harris eventually went along with the DNA testing for Cooper but also implicates Jerry Brown (D-Calif.) in refusing to allow a form of DNA testing that might exculpate Cooper.  The last thing any decent person in this country will tolerate should be, "I'm frameable because I'm an uneducated black man in America."

"Jim Crow Joe [Biden] and Kamala the Cop" from Left Voice — a socialist website, so the Democrats can't write this one off as a Republican smear, either — cites the case of Daniel Larsen, who was sentenced to 27 years under California's three strikes law but exonerated after he served 13 years.  Kamala Harris, however, challenged his release because "he hadn't presented proof that he was innocent quickly enough."  If I read this correctly, Kamala Harris thinks it is OK to imprison an innocent person over a technicality.

None of us would want to entrust our lives to an engineer who let stand rather than correct a mistake in a structural design, or our finances to a CPA who let stand rather than correct a potential accounting error.  Nobody would tolerate a doctor who, upon discovering a medication error, allowed the patient to get the overdose anyway and then buried his mistake.  Why, then, does our society tolerate prosecutors who continue to stand behind cases or convictions after they discover serious problems with their evidence?  Why do we tolerate the "finality" (the word used by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court when it reinstated the Amiraults' conviction) of leaving defendants in prison despite evidence of questionable convictions?

There is also the issue of Harris's failure to support universal use of police body cameras.  (She did require their use by officers who reported to her own agency.)  Body cameras usually, but admittedly not always, keep police and suspects alike on their best behavior.  The Republicans' JUSTICE Act says states that receive federal grants for body cameras "shall have a policy in place to apply discipline to any law enforcement officer who intentionally fails to ensure that a body-worn camera purchased using those funds is engaged, functional, and properly secured at all times during which the camera is required to be worn[.]"

Harris also dragged her heels in terms of following a recommendation to institute a policy for disclosure of police misconduct to defendants.  The Bazelon article cites other equally controversial cases in which Harris has been involved in a position of ultimate responsibility.  This raises serious doubts about her fitness to be only one heartbeat away from the presidency itself.

Civis Americanus is the pen name of a contributor who remembers the lessons of history and wants to ensure that our country never needs to learn those lessons again the hard way.  The author is remaining anonymous due to the likely prospect of being subjected to "cancel culture" for exposing the Big Lie behind Black Lives Matter.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.

 


COVID 19 AND THE SLOW BUT SURE DEATH OF AMERICA

The Human Cost of the Pandemic May Dwarf Its Death Toll By David Wallace-Wells The Human Cost of the Pandemic May Dwarf Its Death Toll By David Wallace-Wells An Italian man suffering from fatigue after recovering from COVID-19 undergoes an ultrasound. Photo: Getty Images The official American death toll from the coronavirus pandemic now stands at 170,000, and while there are some encouraging indications that the growth of the disease is slowing and the fatality rate declining, the U.S. death toll is likely to grow to 227,000 by just November 1, according to Youyang Gu — to date the most accurate modeler of COVID-19 in the country. The global death toll is already 750,000, and while there are some intriguing hints that the disease may be dramatically less deadly in parts of the global south than it has proven in the global north, that total will nevertheless grow significantly in the months ahead, as well. Unfortunately, those figures may also be significantly underestimating the ultimate public-health trauma delivered by the pandemic, perhaps by several orders of magnitude. That is because the conventional death toll misses some major additional impacts of the pandemic, each larger and more distressing than the last. Taken together, they suggest that the full human cost of this pandemic will be many times larger than even horrifying death counts imply. The first important revision of scale is perhaps somewhat familiar: the matter of “excess deaths.” This is the measure of how many more people are dying, during the pandemic, than would have been expected to in more “normal” times. The gap between officially recorded deaths and excess deaths varies from place to place, reflecting differences in both treatment and diagnostic capacity for COVID-19 and in the prevalence of other diseases and conditions on the community. In the U.S., a new estimate finds, excess deaths have already surpassed 200,000 — meaning that here in America, the death toll of the pandemic has been almost 20 percent higher than the official numbers. In England, the excess death toll is about 15 percent higher than the COVID-19 death count; in Peru, it is almost 200 percent higher.The mix of causes of this excess mortality varies from country to country, too: While those figures from Peru most likely reflect many undiagnosed cases of COVID-19, in other parts of the world the “excess” derives more from the secondary effects of the pandemic and lockdown: sick people avoiding the hospital, those in need of “elective” surgery forgoing it, limited hospital and medical resources directed exclusively to the pandemic at the expense of other ongoing risks. In still other parts, the impact might be felt through missed preventative efforts: According to one estimate recently showcased in Nature, the global excess death toll just from TB, AIDS, and malaria, which typically kill 2.4 million annually, could almost double over the next year in a worst-case scenario in which the coronavirus pandemic interferes with the distribution of preventative tools like bed nets, the diagnosis of new cases, and the treatment of those who do fall sick. Even if nothing like those worst-case scenarios comes to pass, the spillover lethality from COVID-19 would still be significant — and would only appear sub-catastrophic because we have long normalized those already catastrophic millions of annual deaths. The second, more mind-bending revision comes from our emerging understanding of the long-term effects of COVID-19. In the spring, our picture of the disease was dominated by hospitalizations, deaths, and recoveries; most Americans following things closely probably understood the full course of illness to last about a month, start to finish. Over the last few months, however, we’ve heard more and more stories about coronavirus “long-haulers,” those still sick well after that one-month cycle should have come to a close, many of them still quite incapacitated by the illness. I don’t think our collective understanding of the disease has properly incorporated those stories, in part because most of our accounts have been, to this point, anecdotal — with the result that the experiences of those suffering in these extended and often confusing ways appear to the rest of us like eerie outliers, tragic but unusual. But we are beginning to get more systematic research into the aftereffects of COVID-19, and though that research is early and limited, it suggests the possibility that these post-recovery complications may prove to be a more significant health trauma to the country, and the world, than the pandemic death toll. The numbers from that emerging research are genuinely hair-raising: 87 percent of Italian patients who had “recovered” from the disease after hospitalization reported at least one ongoing symptom of the disease. 78 percent of recovered German patients were found, two months later, to have suffered structural changes to their hearts; the study focused largely on those with asymptomatic or mild cases, and in follow-ups 76 percent exhibited a biomarker associated with cardiac injury following a heart attack. Another study, of 1,200 patients hospitalized across 69 countries, found that 55 percent had long-term damage to their hearts; subtracting those whose hearts may have had preexisting damage, the study found 46 percent of previously healthy patients showed some amount of long-term scarring and dysfunction. Another study of COVID-19 patients found that roughly 90 percent of those with “severe” cases, 75 percent of those with “moderate” cases, and 60 percent of those with “mild” cases were still experiencing at least one symptom after three months, the most common symptom being breathlessness and fatigue. (Though the findings were less alarming than a few of the other studies, with only about 30 percent of severely sick patients showing abnormal chest X-rays, and other acute issues at even lesser prevalence.) Experts now believe that as many as one in three patients could suffer neurological or psychological aftereffects, according to STAT News. “It’s not only an acute problem,” one critical-care physician told STAT. “This is going to be a chronic illness.” This is a shift in conceptual perspective that isn’t just about kind — acute versus chronic — but scale. Assuming the early research holds, even somewhat, it would mean a long-term impact staggeringly larger than the acute crisis we have all been living through in terror. And it would mean these long-term effects aren’t medical curiosities to be considered on the margins of the disease — but in fact the most common outcome, by far. Today in the United States, the infection fatality rate is about 0.25 percent; at its peak it was about one percent. If three-quarters of those who get sick exhibit heart-attack-like heart damage, that means at least 75 times as many people would be made long-term coronary patients than died from the disease. The German finding is so striking it would be foolish to assume it was representative without other work confirming ratios that high; but even if it is off by a factor of five, it would still suggest at least 15 times as many people might emerge from COVID-19 with lasting heart damage than would die from it. And that is merely one of the emerging long-term conditions. Mercifully, there are some reasons to think this early research may not hold up, at least precisely. The studies have been small, and they have been few. While two-thirds of those surveyed in the eye-opening German study had not been hospitalized, some of that research does focus on those patients who got most sick, at first, and their experiences may not prove representative. Indeed, because most people who get tested are exhibiting some symptoms while roughly half of cases are asymptomatic, any population-level study built around positive diagnoses may be skewed towards a severe experience of the disease, thereby making them not truly representative. There may also be some epidemiological dynamics making more severe cases show up earlier, on average, which could also mean these early results won’t predict the experience of those who haven’t yet gotten the disease. And since it is still only nine months since the disease announced itself, and only about six months since it arrived in full force in Europe and the United States, we don’t know for sure whether these conditions will taper, or linger indefinitely. It is certainly possible, and perhaps even likely, that most of these complications will resolve themselves relatively quickly — if on a timeframe of months rather than weeks. Indeed, many viruses do produce impacts like this, which then dissipate. But a suggestive comparison is to the aftereffects of SARS-CoV-2’s close cousin, SARS-CoV-1: About 20 percent of those infected with the first SARS suffered lasting lung damage, and those left with lung lesions by that disease still had them 15 years later. When I spoke to Scripps Research founder Eric Topol last month, he told me this was where his anxiety was focused. “I’m actually a very optimistic person,” he said, “but lately I’ve become a worry wart. And the main reason I’m worried is these long-term effects.” He added, “More than half of asymptomatic people who had CT scans are registering internal damage to their lungs, and we only know about the lungs because those are the organs we’ve looked at. We haven’t even looked at other organs.” In the U.S., in particular, the declining infection fatality rate has lately been a note of real optimism (to those who could hear it through the pandemic din). But as with everything else having to do with this disease, it is not just rates that matter, but levels. If 20 percent of those who fall sick get enduring health problems, that means one thing for a pandemic like SARS-CoV-1, which infected less than 10,000 people worldwide. It means a very different thing if the pandemic has spread as widely as this one — with more than 5 million confirmed cases just within the U.S. If anything like 75 percent of patients face even some limited long-term difficulties, the scale of impairment implied by tens of millions of sick Americans, and hundreds of millions sick around the world, is quite overwhelming. And even if the lingering disease proliferates at only a few multiples of the volume of deaths, the whole picture of the pandemic and its ultimate impact begin to look very different — and the failure to suppress the disease spread, as every one of our peer countries has done, even more catastrophic. Perhaps 45 million Americans have now been infected by SARS-CoV-2, counting those without a confirmed positive test. That is an alarmingly high number of potential chronic cases. Much of the world is waiting with bated breath for the arrival of a vaccine, which we hope may allow us to turn the page on this long, panicked phase of the pandemic. But millions of us may be carrying damage farther forward, even as the rest of the world moves on.

THE TRUMP REBOOT - BUT CAN HE STILL AVOID PRISON TIME?

 

The Most Tremendous Reelection Campaign in American History Ever

 

Inside the chaotic, desperate, last-minute Trump 2020 reboot.

President Trump speaking in Cleveland on August 6. Photo: JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

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For the two and a half years that he was in charge, a Brad Parscale sighting was always news at Trump campaign headquarters in Rosslyn, Virginia. Parscale is six-foot-eight with a dagger of a beard and thorns for ears that give his head the shape of a spiked club, like a medieval morning star. So you can’t really miss him. But “there were times Brad might not be there for two to three weeks,” one campaign official told me. “If he wasn’t meeting with the president or going on the road, you weren’t seeing him. He was only around for the high-profile, celebrity things.”

“He was never there,” a senior White House official said. “He’d make phone calls from his house in Florida and brag that he was by the pool. And because he was never there, at the campaign office, people would leave at four o’clock in the afternoon.” (Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, told me, “I’ve never FaceTimed Brad, so I cannot speak to what he is or is not doing while I’m on the phone with him.”)

It was a sign of impending doom, to some, when earlier this summer Parscale began coming in more often just as the target on his back swelled to carnival proportions. The polls? Trump trailed his almost-invisible challenger by double digits nationally and by a considerable margin in most battleground states. The messaging? Well, you try to “spin” six months in which 160,000 Americans died and at least 5 million more were infected by a virus you first said wouldn’t be much to worry about. Six months in which your best case for reelection — the greatest economy in the world — was destroyed too. The offense? Trump couldn’t even settle on a nickname for Joe Biden. Was he “Sleepy Joe,” or “Creepy Joe,” or “Beijing Biden”? That tiny Tulsa rally Parscale had organized — which followed weeks of massive hype — preceded a spike in coronavirus infections in the city that, local officials said, was probably born of the event, where the guest list included Herman Cain, who later died. Meanwhile, nationwide, there was civil unrest that Trump, whose political career had begun with a media tour to promote a racist conspiracy theory called birtherism, was unfit to handle. Yet there was an attitude, naïve and cocky, that led Parscale to compare the campaign to the Death Star, ready to fire but with no apparent idea where to aim. What was next? Locusts? How could the circumstances be any worse? The campaign was in a hole so deep it was actually historic — a deficit not just bigger, at this point in the race, than any an incumbent had ever overcome, but bigger than any an incumbent had ever even faced.

Even Trump was finding it more difficult to believe the fiction that everything was going great, and easier and easier to see the nihilistic wisdom of open warfare with the Postal Service in a way that might both cut Democrats’ likely vote-by-mail margins and delegitimize the election more generally. His closest advisers were now telling him that the bad numbers and bad reviews weren’t the fruits of Fake News or a deep-state hoax but a genuine reflection of what could happen in November. Though it took some time for him to accept it. The president recently asked a second senior White House official to review Biden’s performance after watching him speak. “I said, ‘I think if we lose to this guy, we’re really pathetic,’ ” the official told me. “The president said to me, ‘I’m not losing to Joe Biden.’ I said, ‘You’re losing to Joe Biden.’ ”

It was July before he “saw for the first time” that he could be defeated, according to the official. And he didn’t blame himself. He blamed a cruel world, a crueler media, and the Death Star’s failure to defend him from both. “They thought they were running one campaign: We’re on cruise control for the president who gave us the greatest economy of all time, and all the messaging would flow from there. Which socialist are we running against? Bop, bop, bop. And everything changed, and they didn’t change,” the senior White House official said. “The president started to hate the ads. He hated ‘Beijing Biden’ — he didn’t come up with that name.”

In the West Wing, officials filed away gossip and unflattering data points about the campaign manager as if drafting a dossier. When it was reported that Parscale’s web of companies took in $38 million between Inauguration Day and the spring of the pandemic, according to the Federal Election Commission, the story circulated widely. Though Parscale has declined to make clear what portion of his bills to the campaign amount to his personal salary, the New York Times reported in March that Trump had imposed a salary cap on Parscale of somewhere between $700,000 and $800,000 — enough for him to become in midlife a collector of luxury cars and seaside real estate, or at least a media caricature of one. But it wasn’t only Parscale’s spending on Parscale that worried — or “worried” — some of his colleagues; it was his spending on everything else, too, like the $15,000-a-month payments to Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, and to Lara Trump, Eric Trump’s wife, both of whom crisscross the country as campaign surrogates.

“The campaign was spending all this money on silly things. Brad’s businesses kept making money,” the first senior White House official told me. “Everyone was like, What does he even do? He’s just milking the family, basically. And nobody could understand why Jared and the family were putting up with it. That was the talk all the time. Why? Why Brad? He’s not some genius. And I guess people just came to the conclusion that, well, who else would be campaign manager? We’re kind of stuck with this guy.”

Parscale had abided needling before. That came with the job — the 2016 campaign had run on chaos, and this time around, nobody seemed inclined to do anything but up the ante. But as the campaign began to really falter, with Trump not just a little behind but a lot, Parscale became a human pincushion. The Lincoln Project, the group run by self-described “Never Trump” conservatives — members of what was once the Republican Establishment, like John Weaver, Steve Schmidt, and George Conway, husband of the counselor to the president, Kellyanne — bought up airtime in Washington, D.C., with the goal of forcing the president to view a 48-second attack ad about the personal wealth Parscale had accumulated in the four years since he started working for him during the last election. Trump did see the ad, and, later, he asked Parscale why it contained footage of “ass slapping.”

“The president wonders who’s truly loyal to him and who’s not and who’s making a buck on him,” George Conway told me, explaining that, from his perspective, “triggering Trump’s paranoia” is one way to defeat him. “It doesn’t matter who is the captain of the SS Trump, because Trump is the one who is going to run it into the iceberg in the end. If there’s more chaos, all the better. We try to trigger the chaos in Trump’s DNA.”

Even as representatives for the campaign insisted the press was wrong to report that Parscale was about to be fired, “anybody who knew anything knew it was just a matter of time,” the campaign official said. The second senior White House official added, “The Brad special-ops team had three weeks between Tulsa and his firing. They were saying, ‘Brad’s job is safe! Brad’s part of the family!’ Nobody was saying, ‘Is the president’s job safe?’ But the president started to ask that question.”

The president started asking other kinds of questions, too. “Somebody made the point that Dan Scavino will make for the entire year the cost of Brad’s one car, and it really pissed him off,” the second senior White House official said. Scavino, one of Trump’s longest-serving aides, is the White House social-media director, earning a government salary of $183,000 (the maximum for West Wing aides). Parscale, as the Lincoln Project so effectively noted in its ad, owns a Range Rover (starting at $90,000) and a Ferrari (starting at $200,000). “It was a really stark illustration to the president,” the second senior White House official said.

On the evening of July 15, Trump announced his decision: Parscale would be demoted and replaced as campaign manager by Bill Stepien, his former White House political director.

In the weeks that followed, Stepien was described to me by multiple members of the staff as a professional guy who cared only about winning the election — as though the arrival of a campaign manager who cared about winning was a notable development for a campaign on track to lose. “There are more corporate expectations of clocking in and clocking out,” a person close to the campaign and the White House told me. “Overnight, the expectations changed. One week people are being sent home because of covid, the next week it’s like, ‘Be in at 7 a.m.!’ A lot of people felt it was too harsh in the beginning.”

The morning after the deal was done, Parscale arrived at Trump headquarters. The staff crowded around as he recalled the earliest days of the campaign, when he said it was just him and five others working out of the basement of the Republican National Committee. Parscale became emotional — “choked up,” as one campaign official put it — scanning the roomful of faces he’d hired to build an operation he said he was proud of. He said he knew that Stepien would lead the team over the finish line but that — despite what the press was reporting — he wasn’t going anywhere.

“And then he literally just walked right out the door,” the campaign official said with a laugh.

Some people heard he went straight to the airport — which he did, going home to Florida, as much an effort at sanity preservation as it was a courtesy to Stepien, who he feared wouldn’t be able to assert himself while he was hanging around, hanging over him. A few hours later, he tweeted a Bible verse: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.”

“Haven’t seen him since!” the campaign official said. “We didn’t hardly see him before, either. But now we don’t see him at all.”

Former campaign manager Brad Parscale. Photo-Illustration: PAUL SANCYA/GETTY IMAGES/Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

There’s no other way to look at the demotion of Brad other than as a pushback of Jared as well,” the senior White House official said. (The portrait of the campaign in this story is based on interviews with more than 30 sources from the 2020 campaign and the 2016 campaign, Republicans in politics and government at all levels, and people who serve in the highest ranks of the Trump administration.)

Anyone with power or obvious ambitions to obtain it necessarily has rivals in Trumpworld. And Parscale’s close relationship with the president’s son-in-law meant he assumed the role of mark for Jared Kushner’s many haters. From Parscale’s perspective, there was an entire community of people on the outside who seemed to spend every day, every hour, every second vibrating with contempt for people — like him — who had real influence and real relationships with the people who actually mattered. Parscale spoke often to the president and considered him a friend, which, he understood, bred resentment. He tried not to engage with what he saw as dirty fighting — swampy stuff from the very crowd who had said they would drain it — in the belief that karma would have its say in the end.

Parscale’s value, as some saw it, lay not in what he could do for the campaign but in what he could do for Kushner. “Brad was willing to do whatever Jared said and keep quiet about it. Brad was willing to get yelled at by the president and not say to the president, ‘Well, actually, this was Jared’s decision,’ ” the first senior White House official said. “And Jared got to rule from afar because Brad would do whatever he said. In return, Brad made a fuck-ton of money and got to live by the pool in Florida. It was almost like this weird mutual partnership, whether they knew it or not.”

This way of thinking is so pervasive that sometimes, when I’m having a bad day, I wonder if it’s Jared Kushner’s fault. In the case of the reelection campaign, what appeared to be a civil war at the highest levels of Trumpworld, with anti-Kushner factions inside and immediately surrounding the West Wing positioned against representatives of his interests at campaign headquarters, and a last-minute last chance for a reboot before November, was more like WrestleMania. The drama was both all-consuming and self-contained. Parscale and Stepien were both seen as Kushner allies, yet the regime change was nevertheless regarded as revealing some aspect of Kushner’s shifting status — even as he remained functionally in charge the whole time. Kushner’s influence is so total that, even when his proxy is removed, he’s just replaced by yet another proxy. After all, if you’re not a “Kushner guy,” the dismissive term for officials perceived to carry out his will, what kind of guy could you even be?

This Kushner Kremlinology helps explain — though really, probably, only helps, since you’d imagine interpersonal details are ultimately trivial office gossip compared with the actual state of the reelection and what those working on it believe needs to be done to win it — why so many people on the campaign were so focused, in the reporting of this story, on pushing one narrative or another about exactly who was in the room when Parscale was fired. Depending on whom you ask, the meeting at which Trump offered Stepien the job was either kept secret from Kushner, who learned about it only after the deal was done, or orchestrated by Kushner, who urged the president to make the deal in the first place. (Two sources independently volunteered that Kushner was not in the room with Trump and Stepien, while two other sources, who coordinated, said he was. Nobody who anonymously provided information about the meeting to New York would go on the record to dispute their anonymous colleagues or provide corroborating evidence to support their own anonymous claims about this minor detail. All of these people are close to the most powerful man in the world. Are you surprised?)

“I do think it’s shitty that people are out trying to make Brad look bad to make themselves look better,” the source close to the White House and the campaign said. “We’re supposed to be all on the same team.” This person added, “It’s always this unspoken thing. Everybody knows who’s saying and doing things. So that’s really the shady thing. Like, Don’t do your dirty work in the media. Don’t be a coward. But eventually, these people show themselves, and karma’s a bitch.” Parscale, and those who liked him, believed it was Kellyanne Conway who wanted him gone the most. During the 2016 campaign, Conway made no secret that she was annoyed by Parscale’s folksy habit of announcing, to outsiders, that he didn’t know much about politics — and annoyed, too, that he didn’t know much about politics. “It’s charming that Donald Trump has never been in politics before,” she told him once. “It’s not charming that the people who work for him have never worked in politics before.” Parscale thought Conway wanted to take control of the 2020 campaign and that to do so, she needed to prove to the president that Kushner was fucking everything up, and that to do that, she needed to sabotage him. Trump was aware that Parscale saw Conway this way, but Trump also seemed terrified of Conway and never at risk of doing anything to intervene. For reasons Parscale could only speculate about, Conway’s job was always safe. (Conway thought the allegation was ridiculous and that if Brad had focused as much on Michigan and messaging as he did on nonexistent infighting, things might be a little bit different. As she saw it, Parscale’s demotion came after he tried to deny what the president saw with his own eyes — crowd size in Tulsa, the profligate spending, and the polls showing Biden ahead.)

It was Kushner who managed to calm his father-in-law down after the Tulsa disaster, according to a senior White House official, though he’d been the one promoting the rally as a campaign reset for weeks. Kushner told Trump that things were “going to be okay” and dismissed the crisis as “not a big deal,” according to the official. “Jared was pushing these rallies until Tulsa — and then, suddenly, it’s Brad’s fault.”

But Kushner’s intentions and the nature of his role were often willfully misunderstood by staffers who observed a limited percentage of his interactions with the president, according to a senior administration official. “The president always wants to hold rallies. He didn’t need encouragement,” this person said, adding that it was Kushner who got through to the president by explaining the issue to him in these terms: If no professional sports leagues were holding big events, the campaign had to rethink doing so too.

Looking back, Parscale wished he’d been able to stop the Tulsa rally, widely understood to have been his project — to tell the president it was a fucking terrible idea. But getting through to Trump was not easy. The president’s wings had been clipped by the pandemic, and no regular rallies meant no regular contact with crowds, which meant no way for him to know for sure that he had a feel of things. More than numbers, internal or external, he relied on his intuition, a sixth sense of sorts — a short finger not only on the pulse but on the beating heart itself — that made him an entertainer before it made him president. In 2016, one campaign official told me that this was how decisions were made, with orders that started with the words, “I feel like this is where we should go. I’m hearing this out there. Let’s do it that way.” Miller, a senior adviser to the campaign, said that he is in almost constant contact with Trump as Election Day nears, and that one of the things Trump most reliably asks about is “what the supporters are doing, what the activity is around the country, what the on-the-ground feel is for how the race is going — in particular, juxtaposed by the public perception of how the race is going.” Parscale felt pressured to give him what he wanted, so he did.

Senior adviser Jared Kushner. Photo-Illustration: EVAN VUCCI/AP PHOTO/Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

The shopping mall on Paxton Church Road was deserted. Pugliese Brothers (Authentic Italian Sausage), Enviro-Master Services (We Kill the Germs That Kill Your Business!), Sports Paradise (Team Sales Volume Discounts), O.C. Canvas Studio (Canvas Prints • Photo Prints • Art Prints • Custom Prints), Bagel Lovers (Cafe), and Little Owls Knit Shop were all closed. There were just two small signs of life: a half-blinking neon open on the otherwise dark façade of Grace Massage (somewhat suggestively advertised) and the fluorescent lights peeking through the collage of campaign banners in the window of the Dauphin County Republican Committee headquarters.

This was Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I was looking for the ground game. Have you heard about it? The campaign says it’s the greatest ground game to ever exist, that while you don’t see enthusiasm for the president reflected in the rigged polls, you do see it when you talk to his real supporters where they live in Real America. In fact, they talk about surveys of enthusiasm not just as though they are more reliable than real polls but as though they are the polls — as though the traditional kind simply don’t exist, or matter. I drove across the country last month, and I saw only two signs for Joe Biden the entire way. Is this meaningful? The Trump campaign is hoping that it is. In Pennsylvania, they’re making calls and knocking on doors — a million a week — powered by more than 1.4 million volunteers. Pennsylvania is uniquely important. Rural voters won the state for Trump by less than one percentage point in the last election. This time, Trump is behind Biden by a lot. To close the gap, the campaign says it’s hosting dozens of events here — more than in any other state. But good luck finding them.

It was 7 p.m. on July 23, and Team Trump had scheduled a training session for campaign volunteers in the area. Before I arrived, I had worried about my exposure to the virus. I imagined a scene that was part local political-party headquarters and part anti-quarantine protest. I imagined a lot of Trump supporters, maskless and seated close together, breathing heavily on a reporter leaning in to record their comments. But the office was quiet. I walked through the arch of books by right-wing personalities (Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh) and past the portraits (George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan) and maps of Pennsylvania voting precincts. I didn’t see anyone there.

In a blue room in the back, beneath an American flag with the words MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN printed in block letters inside the white stripes, a woman sat alone at the end of a conference table. She wasn’t participating in the volunteer training. She was the volunteer training. There just weren’t any volunteers.

When she first thought I might be one, she was friendly. She offered me coffee and asked me to sit down. Two people had signed up for the Trump Leadership Initiative training, she said, but each of them had canceled, one citing an ear infection and the other citing allergies. When she learned I was a member of the media, her face hardened. She returned her gaze to her computer and told me she wasn’t permitted to speak to the press.

Fifty miles away, at the GOP headquarters in Lancaster, another event was scheduled for 6 p.m. the next night. When I arrived, the local field director, Jason, was talking to an elderly man. “I appreciate all your support, sir,” he said. “Oh, absolutely. I think this election is more important than 1864. Then, we would’ve lost half the country. This time? We could lose the whole country.” Nick, the Trump-Pence regional field director, asked me if I was there for the food drive — which was part of the campaign’s “Latino outreach effort,” he said — or the volunteer training. The elderly man had made his way out the door, and now there was nobody left in the office besides the two men who worked there. “There’s pretty light turnout,” Nick said. But not to worry, as things were “going really well,” Jason said.

A few days later, on July 30, the campaign scheduled two voter-contact training sessions at Convive Coffee Roastery on Providence Boulevard in Pittsburgh. The evening session was supposed to start at 7 p.m., but when I arrived, early, at 5:30, the shop had already been closed for half an hour. A girl cleaning up inside came out to talk to me (even when it’s open, like many such establishments, the pandemic rules are takeout only). She said she had no idea that any campaign had scheduled any kind of meeting at the place where she worked for two hours after closing time. But she hadn’t worked the morning shift that day, when the first event was scheduled, so she texted a co-worker who had. He told her a few people came into the shop and asked about a Trump-campaign meetup but that he didn’t know what they were talking about and couldn’t help them. “I don’t know if they figured it out or not,” she said.

I hung around for another hour waiting until eight to see if anyone showed. Nobody did.

A ten-minute drive away, at the second-floor county Republican committee office, some staffers — two young women and two youngish men — sat peering at their laptops, an enormous portrait of a scowling Trump behind them.

“What event?,” Kevin Tatulyan, an Allegheny County Republican official, asked as he waved me into the room.

“What event?,” Dallas McClintock, the regional Trump-Pence field director, asked.

One of the women, with lilac-colored hair, whipped her head toward McClintock.

“It’s your email here!” she told him, pointing to the advertisement I’d mentioned.

“My email?,” McClintock said in disbelief.

“Yeah!” she said.

He scrunched up his face.

For the next several minutes, the staffers tried to sort out how, with fewer than 100 days until the election, they had unknowingly advertised official campaign events that didn’t exist to potential campaign volunteers in the most important swing state in the country.

They squinted at their screens and asked questions.

“What time?”

“Where did you learn about it?”

“What was the address?”

The second event had been listed with an apparent misspelling in the street name, a detail that prompted the girl with the lilac hair to laugh.

“Sounds right,” she said dryly.

“I’m sorry!” the other woman said, and she seemed to mean it. “If you want to leave us your card, we can make sure to invite you to our events in the future!”

New campaign manager Bill Stepien. Photo-Illustration: BILL DENVER

The night that he became the president’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien didn’t sleep much. There are people who work in politics because they are true believers in a cause or a candidate. Others are drawn by a childlike deference to, or need to be accepted by, authority figures. And others come for the status it confers, the way that office space near the arena can feel like an arena itself. Stepien is not that complicated. He just wants to win.

He faces an uphill path to get there, and doing so will require convincing enough Americans that Trump has “made a lot of really good decisions,” despite all the evidence that says otherwise, as the president told me at a Rose Garden press conference at the height of the pandemic this spring. (“So yeah, we’ve lost a lot of people, but if you look at what original projections were, 2.2 million, we’re probably heading to 60,000, 70,000.” Since then, at least 100,000 more Americans have died.)

Can Stepien make that case? With sandy hair and a vampiric complexion, Stepien looks too young to be a veteran of much more than the Boy Scouts. (After he was promoted, Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld jokingly congratulated the Trump campaign for hiring teenagers.) But at 42 years old, he has been in politics for more than half his life.

People who know Stepien tend to use the phrases “intensely private” and “hard to read” when they discuss him. He is the anti–Brad Parscale, according to officials who have worked with both men: “linear” instead of “scatterbrained,” deliberate rather than emotional, and — most of all — uncomfortable with the spotlight. Parscale seemed to seek public glory, and even when he wasn’t being photographed for magazines or speaking to authors, he was accused of trying to influence his media coverage with anonymous leaks. “Brad’s quotes are six-foot-eight and they’re bearded,” a senior White House official told me. “They’re obvious.” At five-foot-eight, Stepien literally takes up a full foot less space in the world.

To the extent that anyone had thought about it, the story of Bill Stepien was that of a talented political operative squished by scandal just as he was headed for the big leagues. Stepien ran his first campaign in 2002, an intraparty convention race for a local office. His candidate lost. He ran his next campaign in 2003, a New Jersey State Assembly race in the competitive 14th District, for his friend Bill Baroni. On Election Night, as the numbers came in, the win looked decisive for Stepien’s slate of candidates. But something had gone wrong with the math while he was tallying the votes for Baroni’s running mate, a former journalist named Sidna Mitchell. “Bill Stepien screwed the numbers up,” a person who worked with him in New Jersey politics said. “Stepien thought Sidna was ahead by 500, 900 — something like that. He had Sidna go and declare victory.” Mitchell is 79 years old now, but she still remembers that night in 2003. “I was told I had won — I think by, like, 500 points — and to make the victory speech,” Mitchell told me. The next day, Stepien had to inform his candidate that she hadn’t actually won. But State Assembly races being what they are, nobody cared much about this incident, and Stepien kept moving up — George W. Bush in ’04; then to the RNC; Rudy Giuliani in ’08; then, when that didn’t work out, John McCain. In 2009, he ran Chris Christie’s gubernatorial campaign and his reelection after that.

Republicans talk about “the Bob Franks school of politics” — or at least in New Jersey they do. Franks was a congressman, and Stepien had been his driver when he ran, unsuccessfully, for the U.S. Senate in 2000. “Bill Stepien learned about politics from Bob Franks,” one person who worked with Stepien on campaigns in New Jersey told me. “Bob had these rules: ‘Which message to which group of voters gives you 50 percent plus one?’ Bill learned politics that way.”

Stepien, once a part-time Zamboni driver who played forward for the Rutgers Scarlet Knights — “Pretty good on the puck,” said Sean Spiller, now the mayor of Montclair, who remembered winning a championship with Stepien — thought campaigns looked fun, like a sport. A second person who worked with Stepien in New Jersey said the experience taught him an unexpected lesson about how to find the best operatives: “Only hire hockey players, because they beat the crap out of some guy they don’t know just because it’s part of some game they’re playing.”

His beliefs were besides the point: “He didn’t care if every Republican in the state lost — as long as his guy won. He was a Republican by virtue of his environment. He held the right in considerable disdain. I would say he was fairly centrist — but he wasn’t driven by ideology. He never was. Politics was a sport for him. Had his first opportunity been to work for a Democrat, he’d be a Democrat.”

But while replacing Parscale with Stepien has the look of a reboot, at the strategy level it does not seem much has changed or is likely to. Asked how the campaign can formulate a coherent message, given what life is like for most people across the country today, senior adviser Jason Miller said, “It’s very direct: President Trump built the greatest economy in the history of the world, and he’s doing it again.”

But what about the polls? “I’d push back on that,” Miller said. “I have much more timely data, and much more accurate data, than what you have access to. And it’s improved over the last four weeks, and over the last two weeks, it definitely improved. We’re headed in the right direction.

“I feel much better about where we are in 2020 than where we were at this time in 2016. 2016 was brutal. We had Khizr Khan” — the father of Humayun Khan, a U.S. Army captain killed in Iraq in 2004, who criticized Trump during a speech at the Democratic National Convention — “we had Alicia Machado” — a former Miss Universe whom Trump ridiculed for gaining weight — “we had Judge Curiel kicking around somewhere” — a district judge who Trump alleged could not make impartial decisions concerning him owing to his Mexican heritage. “I feel much better,” Miller said.

By the third or fourth interview of the day in which a Trump campaign official argues, with what sounds like sincerity, that not only are the polls all wrong, they are wrong owing to intentional malpractice on the part of major polling institutions and their partnered major media outlets, and not only are they wrong but, actually, polls don’t even matter, because there is a silent majority of American voters who fear telling surveyors what they really believe and because the polls were wrong in 2016 (although they weren’t — national polling correlates to the national vote, not to the Electoral College, and Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million, about what the polls indicated she’d win by, whatever the prediction models created by data journalists suggested), you begin to suspect you are the victim of something that’s not quite a conspiracy but more like a practical joke.

It’s not clear whether Stepien is in on it. Since his arrival, all the changes have appeared cosmetic, managerial, like the job was more office supervisor than chief strategist. He undertook a review of the campaign’s spending, he paused TV advertisements for a few days to sort out whether they were running in the right places, and so on. Asked to describe the way things are different now, campaign officials use strange jargon, referencing “org charts” and “building out middle management” and, above all, “structure.” Structure is the word they use the most. There’s more of it now, or something. This is supposed to be good, though not everyone feels that way. Some veterans of the 2016 race are wistful for what felt, to them, like the beautiful mess that made them who they were, winners against all odds. They didn’t know what they were doing, and there was an honesty to that, since it was kind of the whole pitch to voters.

“We’ve cleaned up — I don’t want to say the mess of — 2016. But we did things on the fly then. If you were like, ‘I wanna take a certain constituency on a bus tour around the country,’ they’d be like, ‘Sure!’ Now, there’s actually a strategy behind it,” a campaign official told me.

Having served as deputy campaign manager under Parscale, Stepien had observed the operation closely, and he had ideas about how to make things slightly better. He moved the countdown clock displaying the number of days until the election in front of the elevators so that it would be the first thing staffers saw when they arrived to work. He decided to give out an Employee of the Week award, something inspired by his political mentor, Mike DuHaime, who’d given out awards to his team when he ran Giuliani’s campaign in 2008. Stepien’s first Employee of the Week received a MAGA hat signed by Donald J. Trump himself. The employee was so moved by the honor that she cried.

With the exception of the time Vice-President Mike Pence came to visit, there had never been a meeting at HQ that included the entire staff — and Stepien noticed this. He is, you could say, the kind of guy who likes meetings. He planned to hold all-hands meetings every week for the rest of the campaign. The first would be the morning after his promotion was announced. Throughout the night, he thought about what he wanted to tell the staff, and he settled on this: Everything each of them was doing every minute of the day should be in the service of winning the vote. They should envision every day from now until Election Day as “a series of individual campaigns” and “to win every single day.” He said he would not tolerate being “outworked” by Biden’s campaign. “They may be more talented or better looking than us,” Stepien said, but they would not work harder.

“Is it a mess? Yeah. Everybody’s in chaos because there’s new leadership,” a senior White House official said. “But it’s like, ‘We’re all in this shitshow together right now! We really gotta make it work, guys.’ ”

If I just woke you up in the middle of the night and told you a guy who is deeply involved in Bridgegate is now calling himself campaign manager for Donald Trump, you wouldn’t have said, ‘You’re kidding me! I’m shocked. How did that happen?,’ ” Stuart Stevens said with a laugh. You’d have said, Of course.

Stevens is a veteran of Republican presidential campaigns whose latest book, It Was All a Lie, is about his newfound realization — at 67 years old — that his life’s work was a mistake. As he sees it, Trump has a “management philosophy” that has guided him from the Trump Organization to the 2016 campaign to the White House and now to the campaign for reelection. “What Trump does is take people who are mediocre talent at best, who know they could never have the position they have if it were not for Trump, and it creates this instant loyalty to Trump. When you look at Trumpworld, it’s all these people who weren’t involved in presidential races, and it wasn’t because they didn’t want to be; it was because nobody would hire them. It’s not like Steve Bannon woke up one day and said, ‘I think I’d like to get involved in campaigns!’ Or Corey Lewandowski, all of these people. It’s how you end up with Brad Parscale. Top professionals won’t work for you.”

The idea had always been for Bill Stepien to run a presidential race — but it was supposed to be Chris Christie’s. In the three years between Election Night in Asbury Park and Election Night in Trump Tower, however, all did not go as planned for the boss or his broker. It seems rather silly now, like a story about the Gotti family if they lived in Whoville, but the allegation that Christie ordered the closing of access lanes to the George Washington Bridge in order to exact revenge on a Democratic mayor who didn’t endorse him was such big news that it acquired its own gate.

To save himself, Christie fired who he had to — including Stepien, who had referred to the mayor of Fort Lee as “an idiot” in messages obtained by the press, and who most people who knew anything about his position suspected knew about the plot. Christie announced that he was “disturbed by the tone and behavior and attitude of callous indifference” shown by Stepien and that reading the messages “made me lose my confidence in Bill’s judgment.” Just two days earlier, he’d nominated Stepien to be chairman of the state party. Now, he said he had asked him to withdraw his name from consideration and to stop consulting for the RNC. “If I cannot trust someone’s judgment, I cannot ask others to do so, and I would not place him at the head of my political operation because of the lack of judgment that was shown in the emails that were revealed yesterday.”

But Christie wasn’t finished with Stepien. The following week, he hired a law firm to conduct an internal review of his administration’s role in the lane closures. At a press conference at the Park Avenue office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Christie’s lawyer, Randy Mastro — a protégé of Giuliani — announced his findings with a 360-page report: His client was innocent, and Bridgegate was the fault of David Wildstein, an anonymous political blogger and Christie appointee at the Port Authority, and Bridget Anne Kelly, Christie’s deputy chief of staff. The report included a gratuitous disclosure: While working together, Kelly and Stepien “became personally involved,” but by the time of the lane closures, “their personal relationship had cooled, apparently at Stepien’s choice, and they largely stopped speaking.”

“The humiliation — being kicked to the curb and to be told someone lost faith in you — that hurt him,” a person close to the Christie administration told me. “Christie wasn’t just his boss; he was a friend. If you’re trusting and people hurt you, it’s almost like you’re used to it. But if you don’t let people in, I imagine it’s worse when they hurt you, and in trying to clean up his mess and not leave anything behind, Christie killed everything in his wake that could cause him harm.”

A second person close to the Christie administration said, “Christie just killed him. He didn’t even have the balls to call him.” Christie asked DuHaime to tell Stepien about his decision, this person said. “DuHaime brought Stepien to the dance. To make DuHaime do that was just awful.”

Under the belief that his idiot staffers cost him his shot at the White House, Christie “did everything he could” to “salt the earth” for them, ensuring they wouldn’t have political careers after they were fired, according to the second person close to the administration. “I can’t fault the guy for working for Trump. He’s gotta make a living. And it’s ironic, right? He ended up running a presidential campaign.” A senior official in the Trump administration said that when Kushner first tried to hire Stepien as field director during the 2016 Republican primary, Corey Lewandowski, who was then campaign manager, called Christie, who was still running for the nomination himself, and Christie helped Lewandowski convince Trump that Stepien was a bad idea, overruling Kushner. It was only later, when Lewandowski had been fired and Christie had dropped out and endorsed Trump, that Kushner was able to hire Stepien. (Lewandowski denies this happened, and another source involved in the discussions said that Christie never had anything bad to say about Stepien and never tried to prevent him from being hired by any campaign; but a third source with knowledge of the conversations affirmed the senior official’s account was “100 percent” true.)

“When he kicked Bill to the curb and ran everyone else over with the bus, he thought he’d finished Bill,” the first person close to the Christie administration said. “Jared had a huge role in bringing in Bill and trusting Bill for no other reason than he hates Christie too.”

Christie hadn’t fired Kushner or humiliated him by publicizing private details about his sex life — even worse, Christie had humiliated Kushner’s father. As the U.S. Attorney in 2004, Christie went after Charlie Kushner, a powerful real-estate developer and Democratic donor, in an investigation that would tear his family apart. Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering (he’d retaliated against his brother-in-law, who was cooperating with investigators, by hiring a prostitute to seduce him, filming the encounter, then sending the tape to his sister. Pretty intricate and amazing stuff, if you ask me, and Charlie, if you’re reading this, I’d love to take you out for lunch). He was sentenced to two years in prison, of which he served 14 months in Montgomery, Alabama. Jared, then a student at NYU, flew to visit him every weekend, and for years after he got out, Jared reportedly used a wallet his dad had made him while he was inside.

“Bringing Bill into the Trump circle in 2016 was a slap in the face to Chris Christie,” one of the people close to the Christie administration said. “Like, ‘Okay, Christie, you’re irrelevant, and I’m gonna pick your guy who is no longer your guy.’ ”

“If they ended up in the afterlife together — though I’m confident they’re not going to the same place — Bill Stepien would still haunt Chris Christie,” said someone close to the Christie administration. “If Christie thinks Stepien is ever going to forgive him for what happened, then he doesn’t know Stepien. He never forgets. He never forgives. It’s why I’m not gonna be quoted in your story.”

People on the campaign say they believe — have to believe — there’s a way forward. If they just win North Carolina (where Trump leads by an average of one or two percentage points), Florida (where Biden leads by five), and Arizona (Biden by two), states Trump won in 2016, then they need only one state in the so-called blue wall of Pennsylvania (Biden by six or seven), Wisconsin (Biden by seven), and Michigan (Biden by seven or eight). These three states had gone Democratic in every presidential election since 1992 before Hillary Clinton lost them by 77,000 votes combined in 2016. Staffers assume that Ohio is already a Trump lock, although Biden is ahead there, too, by an average of more than two points.

“I don’t think we’re gonna lose this campaign,” said Bob Paduchik, Trump’s 2016 Ohio state director and a senior adviser to the 2020 campaign. “I don’t think we’re losing this campaign.” He told me the polling averages didn’t show Biden winning Ohio. I said that was wrong. Well, Paduchik said, the RealClearPolitics average didn’t show Biden winning. I told him that was wrong too — that I happened to be looking at that particular website as we spoke. Even Rasmussen, Trump’s preferred polling outfit, had Trump down by five, I said. “No,” Paduchik said, Rasmussen didn’t have a poll like that. When I said it sure did, that I was looking right at it, Paduchik said he couldn’t speak to that poll since he hadn’t reviewed it himself. Either way, he said, the polls were silly, based as they are on the premise that they measure how people would vote if the election were held today. “Well, the election is not today!” he said. “We haven’t had our debates and our convention yet. It’s sort of a fantasy guess.”

Seeing a path to Trump’s reelection doesn’t actually require fantasy. If the pandemic subsides, if the debates wound the challenger, if the polling narrows a bit, the hidden Trump voter — if such people exist — and the design of the Electoral College may be enough. If circumstances get slightly less bad, if the president forms a habit of making things worse a little less often, if he gets a little luck just one more time, he could pull this off again. Maybe Kanye West, or doubts about the official results of the election, or ratfucking the Postal Service, or birtherism directed at Kamala Harris is all the campaign strategy Trump needs.

But while Stepien has focused August ad spending in battleground states with early voting, effectively trying to stall the race long enough for the national picture to change, few on the campaign he’s running seem to be thinking in strategic terms at all, never mind enough to generate the kind of miracle the president needs. Instead, they seem to think that if they got lucky the last time, and proved the conventional wisdom wrong, maybe they’ll just happen to get lucky again.

And Trump does believe in luck — of course he does. “The president is superstitious,” one senior White House official told me, explaining why so many characters from 2016 seemed to suddenly come back for the final stretch of 2020. “I think what people miss about him is he’s more patient than he seems.”

*This article appears in the August 17, 2020, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!