Trump Failure to Show Empathy on Virus Cost Votes, Parscale Says
Trump Failure to Show Empathy on Virus Cost Votes, Parscale Says
(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump’s former campaign manager said that the president erred in not showing more empathy about the coronavirus pandemic, costing him crucial support among suburban families in swing states like Pennsylvania and Georgia.
“I think if he would have been publicly empathetic, he would have won by a landslide,” Brad Parscale said in an interview on Fox News that was broadcast on Tuesday.
Parscale, who was replaced as campaign manager in July, said he had “a difference” with the president on this, and that he believed Americans frightened by the deadly virus “wanted to see an empathetic president and an empathetic Republican Party.”
Instead, he said, Trump decided “to go for opening the economy first.”
Parscale also said he was “hurt” by the president’s decision to remove him as campaign manager, and suggested that the change with just months until Election Day might have been disruptive.
“They paused, they didn’t know my plan, they didn’t know to execute it or not and they started to diverge away from it,” Parscale said.
The interview was Parscale’s first since he was detained by police outside his Florida home in late September. Fort Lauderdale police said that Parscale’s wife was worried that he might be suicidal and attributed scratching and bruising on her face and arms to previous spousal abuse. Parscale subsequently denied having abused his wife in a statement.
Asked about the episode in the Fox interview, Parscale said he and his wife were “in a much better place now.”
“We went through a very stressful time for five years,” he said, adding that while he had been in a “bad place” he felt as if he was “getting better every day.”
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