Trump may be being conned by his own campaign manager as his polls continue to collapse: columnist

According to a column in the conservative Bulwark, Donald Trump's campaign manager Brad Parscale is likely taking advantage of the president's disinterest in details and his inability to understand technology to hang onto his job even though the president is struggling at the polls.

Writing that he is not entirely skeptical of Parscale's boast that he has created a "death star" that will deliver a second term to Trump, Jonathan Last stated he has some questions, and that the campaign manager may be pulling the wool over the president's eyes.

"In 2016, Trump cycled through campaign managers at a rapid clip. The only job security Parscale has comes from convincing Trump that he has built some magical machine which no one else—and especially not Old Man Trump—can understand. Or operate," the columnist wrote. "Creating the impression that the entire Trump campaign will rise or fall with an opaque digital operation is a way to make Parscale un-fireable."

"Unlike the 2016 campaign, which was basically about letting Trump be Trump, there is now a great deal of sunk-cost into an operation which is purpose-built to keep the septuagenarian boss from understanding how it works. Or even, what it really is," Last explained, before adding, "The digital operation is too sprawling, too micro-targeted, and too evanescent for anyone to really have a handle on how effective it is."

What should concern Trump, Last suggested, is the fact that the president is trailing presumed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden by considerable margins -- particularly worrisome for an incumbent president.

"All you can really do is look at the polls. And as Harry Enten wrote last weekend, Biden has the largest and steadiest lead any challenger has ever held against an incumbent. As in: Ever," Last noted dryly adding, "I’m sure Big Brad will tell the boss that without his Magical Internet Machine he’d be losing to Biden by even more right now. And for all I know, that’s true. But I kind of suspect it’s not."

Calling the disconnect, "...just one more sign of Trump’s weakness," Last suggested, "In 2016, Trump bet on himself. He saw campaigns as basically superfluous and certainly viewed campaign managers as disposable cogs in the machine that is the cult of Donald J. Trump."

"If Trump keeps Parscale around even as he lags Biden in the polls, it’s a sign that the president no longer believes that he is enough to get his voters out on his own and that he’s hostage to whatever sales pitch he bought from Parscale," he wrote, before dryly adding, "It’s a good reminder that inside every con man is a mark."

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