Trump Campaign Manager Skewered for Lame Spin Defending President After Kentucky GOP Governor’s Loss

Reed RichardsonNov 6th, 2019, 12:03 am
 
Donald Trump, Matt Bevin at campaign rally

Matt Bevin and Donald Trump at campaign rally in Lexington, Kentucky, on November 4, 2019. Photo credit: Mandel Ngan, AFP/Getty Images.

“Just about dragged” was just about dragged.

Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale was mercilessly mocked after offering up that line as a lame, tired-of-all-the-almost-winning excuse in the wake of incumbent Republican Governor Matt Bevin’s loss just one day after President Donald Trump held a big, in-state rally for the governor’s re-election in Kentucky.

With all precincts reporting on Tuesday night, Democratic challenger Andy Beshear held a nearly 5,000 vote-lead over Bevin, a margin of about 0.4 percent. And as the failure of Trump to flip the election became apparent, Parscale quickly released statements that engaged in some shameless goalpost moving.

“The President just about dragged Gov. Matt Bevin across the finish line, helping him run stronger than expected in what turned out to be a very close race at the end,” Parscale said in a written statement. One day earlier, however, Trump had specifically tied the race to his own political power at the campaign rally, saying: “If you lose, it sends a really bad message. …You can’t let that happen to me.”

Parscale then followed that resetting of expectations with a Tweeted shot at the press as “full of crap” for pointing out Trump’s proxy loss and not-so-subtly re-appraising Beshear’s appeal as a “moderate.” Just 24 hours earlier, though, Parscale’s bos had called the Democrat a “major lefty” who is “too liberal” and “represents the Washington swamp.”

The online reaction to Parscale and the Trump campaign’s brazen tap-dancing away from Bevin’s political failure was both swift and blunt.

When Trump did finally weigh in on Twitter, he echoed his campaign manager’s framing that touted the narrow loss as a Pyrrhic victory and preemptively blamed the press for blaming him for Bevin’s loss.

 And it should be noted, while Parscale was furiously downplaying the implications of the Trump-endorsed Bevin’s embarrassing defeat, he was simultaneously giving the president credit for securing the victory of Republican Tate Reeves in the Mississippi governor’s race.

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