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American families who had lost loved ones in lonely
hospital rooms. Trump was defeated because of his
“failure to connect on the thing that voters most cared
about, which was corona virus,” says Sarah Long well,
founder of Republican Voters Against Trump (RVAT).
While legions lost jobs, closed businesses, refrained
from hugging their aging parents and homeschooled
their children, “what Trump did was decide to pre-
tend like corona virus wasn’t the most dominant thing
in people’s lives,” Longwell says.
The rifts he widened will not be easily repaired.
The 2020 election and its aftermath prove Trump
still has a hold on the Republican Party. In defeat, he
won millions more votes than he did in 2016.One key mistake came nearly three years ago,
when Trump hired Brad Parscale as his campaignmanager. A digital guru, Parscale ran a social media
advertising blitz on Facebook that helped Trump win
the White House. But Parscale had never managed
a campaign, let alone one for an incumbent Presi-
dent with a perilously narrow path to re- election. He
spent lavishly, burning through hundreds of millions
of dollars and frittering away a sizable cash advan-
tage. “Brad had never run any campaign before,” says
Mike DuHaime, a veteran Republican strategist, and
“to suddenly put him in charge of a billion-dollar op-
eration I think is unfair and a bad decision.” (Parscale
says the campaign budget and his spending were
approved by several other senior campaign leaders.
“You can disagree with my strategy or my budget,
but saying I didn’t have one is ridiculous,” he says.)
In July, Trump replaced Parscale with deputy
DOUG MILLS—NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX campaign manager Bill Stepien, who set about
Trump leaves the
White House press
briefing room after
making a defiant
statement on Nov. 5