Brad Parscale, Trump's new campaign manager, hired Eric Trump's wife as his liaison to the campaign

(Image credit: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)

published 28 February 2018

You'd think a president who claims to have accomplished 64 percent of his agenda after one year in office wouldn't need a second term, but President Trump has been officially running for re-election since literally the day he was sworn in, and on Tuesday he named a campaign manager, Brad Parscale. Parscale, who started creating webpages for Trump in 2011 before becoming the digital backbone of his 2016 campaign, never really left — he's "on the payroll of five campaign and political advocacy organizations tied to Trump, lucrative work that made him central to Trump's campaign even before his appointment as campaign manager," The Associated Press reports, and his ties to the Trump family run deep:

Parscale has hired Eric Trump's wife, Lara, a move that reflects his close relationship to the family and shields how much she is being paid from public disclosure because she works for a private company. According to the terms of her hiring last March, she was Giles-Parscale's liaison to the campaign, working out of Trump Tower. Neither she nor Parscale responded to emailed questions about her current compensation. [The Associated Press]

Parscale is also close with Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law. And helping Trump win, notably by tapping into the micro-targeting power of Facebook, has been lucrative for Parscale in other ways. In August, he agreed to sell his San Antonio digital marketing company to the California firm CloudCommerce, which AP calls "a penny-stock firm with a questionable history that includes longstanding ties to a convicted fraudster" who is still involved in management decisions.

CloudCommerce has "sufficient red flags to give a responsible regulator reason to investigate," former SEC senior counsel Jacob Frenkel tells AP. "What about this company isn't a red flag?" You can read more about the company, where Parscale is now part of the management team, at AP, and learn more about Parscale in the CBS News report below. Peter Weber

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.