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Analysis
Either Brad Parscale made former President Donald Trump, or Trump made him. Maybe a little bit of both.
Parscale’s been around Big Tech since before the term entered the lexicon, but he wasn’t always as impressed.
In 2009, Parscale tweeted a link to a since-deleted blog on his company’s website downplaying Twitter’s usefulness to brands and suggesting that to some, “Twittering sounds like a bunch of ‘Jabberwocky.’”
Social media clearly grew on him since then.
Parscale was the digital director for Trump’s 2016 campaign, which earned him accolades, an investigation, and notoriety. His influence on politics will be felt for years to come. Parscale later bragged that they’d turned the Republican National Committee “into one of the largest data-gathering operations in United States history.”
As if anyone heard about the FBI’s Carnivore program and thought, let’s do that but for politics.
He seems unfazed that “all that crazy Facebook stuff” he did in 2016 was all up in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. After Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) campaign texted him in 2020, he posted on Facebook, “Almost feel bad for the DNC and Bernie for having such bad data.”
Parscale’s success in 2016 and unfailing loyalty to the Trumps earned him the position of campaign director for Trump’s second campaign.
At the time, we wondered whether Parscale would last through the next election.
He almost made it—and he might’ve too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids! (And one very cool grandma.)
For Trump’s first pandemic rally, TikTok users flooded the event page with disingenuous ticket requests. This somehow fooled Parscale, who is presumably pretty tech-savvy, into tweeting excitedly that people had requested 800,000 tickets.
The event was a bust and Trump was furious about the abysmal turnout. He later demoted Parscale back to digital director. Two months later, Parscale was arrested and hospitalized for his mental health.
Parscale may have stumbled, but the big man (he’s 6’8”) didn’t fall down. Federal Election Commission records show that his new companies have raked in over $300,000 in campaign cash since 2020—more than a third of it from Trump.
Parscale is on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Gab, Gettr, Truth Social, and Parler.
Dirtiest Delete
As Aaron Sorkin wrote in The Social Network, “The internet’s not written in pencil … it’s written in ink.” So while the tweet calling Trump an “idiot” may have long since been deleted, the fact that Parscale liked it will live forever.
