31THE DEATH STAR
The campaign is run from the 14th floor of a gleaming, modern
office tower in Rosslyn, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.
Glass-walled conference rooms look out on the Potomac River.
Rows of sleek monitors line the main office space. Unlike the boot-
strap operation that first got Trump elected—with its motley band
of B-teamers toiling in an unfinished space in Trump Tower—his
2020 enterprise is heavily funded, technologically sophisticated,
and staffed with dozens of experienced operatives. One Republican
strategist referred to it, admiringly, as “the Death Star.”
Presiding over this effort is Brad Parscale, a 6-foot-8 Viking of
a man with a shaved head and a triangular beard. As the digital
director of Trump’s 2016 campaign, Parscale didn’t become a
household name like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. But
he played a crucial role in delivering Trump to the Oval Office—
and his efforts will shape this year’s election.
In speeches and interviews, Parscale likes to tell his life story as
a tidy rags-to-riches tale, embroidered with Trumpian embellish-
ments. He grew up a simple “farm boy from Kansas” (read: son
of an affluent lawyer from suburban Topeka) who managed to
graduate from an “Ivy League” school (Trinity University, in San
Antonio). After college, he went to work for a software company
in California, only to watch the business collapse in the economic
aftermath of 9/11 (not to mention allegations in a lawsuit that
he and his parents, who owned the business, had illegally trans-
ferred company funds—claims that they disputed). Broke and
desperate, Parscale took his “last $500” (not counting the value
of three rental properties he owned) and used it to start a one-
man web-design business in Texas.
Parscale Media was, by most accounts, a scrappy endeavor at
the outset. Hustling to drum up clients, Parscale cold-pitched
shoppers in the tech aisle of a Borders bookstore. Over
time, he built enough websites for plumbers and gun
shops that bigger clients took notice—including the
Trump Organization. In 2011, Parscale was invited
to bid on designing a website for Trump Interna-
tional Realty. An ardent fan of The Apprentice, he
offered to do the job for $10,000, a fraction of the
actual cost. “I just made up a price,” he later told The
Washington Post. “I recognized that I was a nobody
in San Antonio, but working for the Trumps would
be everything.” The contract was his, and a lucrative
relationship was born.
Over the next four years, he was hired to design
websites for a range of Trump ventures—a winery,
a skin-care line, and then a presidential campaign.
By late 2015, Parscale—a man with no discernible
politics, let alone campaign experience—was running
the Republican front-runner’s digital operation from
his personal laptop.
Parscale slid comfortably into Trump’s orbit. Not
only was he cheap and unpretentious—with no hint
of the savvier-than-thou smugness that characterized
other political operatives—but he seemed to carry a
chip on his shoulder that matched the candidate’s.
“Brad was one of those people who wanted to provethe establishment wrong and show the world what he was made
of,” says a former colleague from the campaign.
Perhaps most important, he seemed to have no reservations
about the kind of campaign Trump wanted to run. The race-
baiting, the immigrant-bashing, the truth-bending—none of it
seemed to bother Parscale. While some Republicans wrung their
hands over Trump’s inflammatory messages, Parscale came up
with ideas to more effectively disseminate them.
The campaign had little interest at first in cutting-edge ad
technology, and for a while, Parscale’s most valued contribution
was the merchandise page he built to sell MAGA hats. But that
changed in the general election. Outgunned on the airwaves and
lagging badly in fundraising, campaign officials turned to Google
and Facebook, where ads were in expensive and shock value was
rewarded. As the campaign poured tens of millions into online
advertising— amplifying themes such as Hillary Clinton’s crimi-
nality and the threat of radical Islamic terrorism—Parscale’s team,
which was christened Project Alamo, grew to 100.
Parscale was generally well liked by his colleagues, who recall
him as competent and intensely focused. “He was a get-shit-done
type of person,” says A. J. Delgado, who worked with him. Perhaps
just as important, he had a talent for ingratiating himself with the
Trump family. “He was probably better at managing up,” Kurt
Luidhardt, a consultant for the campaign, told me. He made sure
to share credit for his work with the candidate’s son-in-law, Jared
Kushner, and he excelled at using Trump’s digital ignorance to flat-
ter him. “Parscale would come in and tell Trump he didn’t need to
listen to the polls, because he’d crunched his data and they were
going to win by six points,” one former campaign staffer told me. “I
was like, ‘Come on, man, don’t bullshit a bullshitter.’ ” But Trump
seemed to buy it. (Parscale declined to be interviewed for this story.)AS TRUMP’S 2016 DIGITAL DIRECTOR, BRAD PARSCALE FLOODED
OPENING SPREAD: HANNA ALANDI / GETTY;THIS PAGE: JABIN BOTSFORD / THE INTERNET WITH THE CAMPAIGN’S MESSAGES.
THE WASHINGTON POST/ GETTY