Jared Kushner is shaking-up his father-in-law’s campaign team, starting with ‘reassigning’ Donald Trump’s campaign organizer after the Tulsa rally flop last month.
Michael Glassner knew, a person familiar with the reorganization told Axios in a Tuesday report, knew he was going to take the fall for the massive campaign rally mishap, where attendance was nowhere near anticipated after thousands of fake ticket requests were filled out.
‘Michael didn’t really make many mistakes,’ the source claimed, adding that ‘he did what he always did’ when planning the Tulsa rally.
‘[I]t just didn’t work post-COVID,’ they conceded.
‘I think he knew he was going to take the punishment for this,’ the source continued. ‘It was on his watch.’
Kushner, the president’s senior adviser, is taking lead on the shake-up, and three sources familiar with the situation told Axios that he assigned Trump’s 2016 Arizona chair Jeff DeWit as chief operating officer to oversee the final stretch to November.
DeWit’s new role will include a heavy hand in organizing and running rallies, like he was also involved with in 2016.
Donald Trump’s campaign organizer Michael Glassner (left) is being ‘reassigned’ to a legal role after the Tulsa rally failure
Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner is leading a reorganization effort within the campaign after the rally turn out a dismal crowd and the polling shows the president losing to Joe Biden
Trump’s 2016 Arizona chair Jeff DeWit (pictured) has been brought on board as chief operating officer to oversee the final stretch to November – including having a heavy hand in rally operations
The Trump campaign downplayed the movement within the team.
‘This is not a reaction to Tulsa,’ the campaign’s Communications Director Tim Murtaugh claimed in a statement. ‘Michael Glassner is moving into the long-term role of navigating the many legal courses we face, including suits against major media outlets, some of which will likely extend beyond the end of the campaign.’
‘He is one of the founding members of Team Trump and his dedication to the success of the President is unmatched,’ Murtaugh continued.
Another person familiar with the decision claimed it wasn’t fair to blame Glassner, and asserted regardless of what happened in Tulsa, he ‘was never intended to be the chief operating officer for the final stretch’ and was just filling the role for the ‘ramp up stage.’
Glassner has been with the Trump campaign since 2015 helping organize the massive signature rallies.
According to various sources, he will now be a more behind-the-scenes paper pusher handling the campaign’s lawsuits.
DeWit is a businessman who previously served as an Arizona state treasurer and chief financial officer of NASA under Trump from 2018 to earlier this year – he is also an ally of Kushner.
Kushner brought in DeWit in 2016 to help oversee the campaign’s budget and contracts, and the two have been in talks for weeks about him coming into another campaign role, a source familiar with the discussions revealed.
Donald Trump’s comback rally in Tulsa turned out a less-then crowd, with more than 6,000 attendees of the more than 19,000 seats in the stadium
Now DeWit will do ‘dynamic budgeting’ for the reelection effort, the source said, which will include reassessing the campaign’s spending and overseeing fundraising efforts.
DeWit will be reupping his role in rally operations, like he did in the last presidential election, as well.
President Trump was adamant about having a massive comeback rally post-coronavirus as he was forced to take a break from his usual campaign tactics with the emergence of the threat and implementation of state-wide lockdowns and social-distancing restrictions.
He announced last month he was returning to the scene with a bang at a rally in Tula, Oklahoma where no social distancing or masks would be required.
While it was announced that around 1 million tickets were requested on the website, the BOK Stadium, which has a capacity of 19,199, saw only around 6,200 attendees.
Many White House officials have blamed the poor Tulsa rally turnout on the president’s campaign team, while TikTok users and K-Pop fans have claimed they were able to successfully bolster the president’s efforts by filling out fake forms for ticket requests – giving a false sense of a high demand.