Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. 

Courtesy of NYT:

President Trump on Wednesday shook up his re-election team with less than four months until November’s vote, replacing his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, in an acknowledgment of the president’s diminished standing in nearly all public and private polling since the spring.

Mr. Parscale, who was named campaign manager unusually early, in February 2018, will step out of the job and Bill Stepien, currently the deputy campaign manager and a veteran political operative, will take over. Mr. Parscale will stay on with the campaign, becoming a senior adviser for data and digital operations.

The move comes as Mr. Trump’s advantages as an incumbent president have eroded in the face of a pandemic that has killed over 137,000 Americans and battered the nation’s economy — once Mr. Trump’s most powerful argument for re-election. The president has been heavily criticized for his handling of the coronavirus and the halting federal response to it, and Mr. Trump’s own public comments have deepened the hole in which he finds himself in national and battleground state polling.

Several new polls released Wednesday showed Mr. Trump trailing the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., by double digits, and in one of them, 62 percent of respondents said they believed Mr. Trump was “hurting rather than helping” efforts to combat the pandemic.

“I am pleased to announce that Bill Stepien has been promoted to the role of Trump campaign manager,” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “Brad Parscale, who has been with me for a very long time and has led our tremendous digital and data strategies, will remain in that role, while being a senior adviser to the campaign. Both were heavily involved in our historic 2016 win, and I look forward to having a big and very important second win together.”

This is now widely recognized as Trump’s first response to bad news, pick a scapegoat, and then punish them. 

I can almost guarantee that Parscale’s major sin was telling Trump some version of the truth and that this Stepien guy is only telling Trump what he wants to hear. 

By the way, in case you were wondering, changing campaign managers four months before an election is never a sign that the campaign is doing well.