Who is President Trump's new campaign manager?

US President Donald Trump has made a surprise announcement about a change in senior personnel in his election campaign team. The move to change the campaign manager comes as President Trump's political prospects have been facing many disadvantages in recent weeks, especially after the campaign rally with less than expected attendance in Tulsa, Oklahoma in June.

Known as the master of President Trump's 2016 digital campaign, Brad Parscale has now been replaced by Bill Stepien as the Director of the 2020 Presidential Re-election Campaign. Bill Stepien is a longtime adviser to Trump and worked on the 2016 presidential campaign. He also served as the White House political director for the first two years of President Trump's term.

Bill Stepien was appointed as Director of President Trump's 2020 re-election campaign. Photo: AP

The abrupt change in personnel also underscores the challenge facing President Trump’s senior aides: reinventing the president’s campaign; tackling the biggest health and pandemic crisis in a century without upsetting the president’s approval ratings, a key measure of campaign success.

The Trump campaign’s main challenge is to find areas where local officials are willing to allow large-scale campaign events and not blame the president if an outbreak occurs after the rally ends. Oklahoma, remember, reported a record number of new cases three weeks after President Trump’s June 20 rally.

Some states like Florida and Michigan, which played a pivotal role in the 2020 election, have pushed back plans to reopen their economies to cope with the second wave of Covid-19, so hosting crowded campaign events for Trump or Biden in these states is not easy.

As the Trump campaign struggles with the setbacks of reversing reopening plans in many states, it is also racing to restore its approval ratings, which have deteriorated over the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. A Reuters-Ipsos poll in early July found that more than a quarter of voters said their plan to help the country recover from the coronavirus was the top deciding factor for their vote. This is a sharp change from previous polls, when most voters said economic recovery was the top priority.

President Trump campaigned in Tulsa. Photo: Politico

Trump’s approval ratings are falling in many long-standing Republican strongholds like Arizona and Georgia, as states struggling to contain the outbreak are seeing a resurgence. Last week, the Trump administration warned foreign students studying in the US that they would have to return home if their schools switched to online learning – an effort to further the US’s anti-immigration agenda. But under pressure from all sides, including from universities, the Trump administration this week canceled plans to deport international students studying online.

Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said the campaign is expected to regroup in the next week or two. And President Trump's campaign team has frequently dismissed doubts about his chances of winning, saying, "If the concerns of 2016 had come true, Hillary Clinton would be in the White House right now. Joe Biden is the weakest Democratic opponent in decades, and we are beating him. With four months to go until Election Day, and between President Trump's impressive record and Biden's 50-year record of failure, the choice is clear."