Ahead of a Trump rally in Dallas, Donald Trump Jr. and Brad Parscale, a former San Antonian and President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign manager, made a stop in San Antonio on Tuesday.
Railing against what they called the radical left, Trump Jr., his girlfriend and senior Trump campaign adviser Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Parscale touted the strength of Trump’s donor base in Texas and claimed Trump’s policies had contributed to positive gains for the state’s economy.
“This president has literally transformed this country,” Guilfoyle said. “He’s not only made America great again, he’s going to keep America great.”
Each of the three Trump campaign officials took turns on the stage at the Henry B. González Convention Center, in a room filled with hundreds of the president’s supporters. Minutes before the programming began, the assembled crowd chanted “U-S-A” and “Four more years!” Drawing on Trump’s recent remarks dismissing the impeachment inquiry as a witch hunt, supporters waved a Trump 2020 banner echoing the president’s claim that the inquiry is “wasting everyone’s time and energy.”
“When I look out into this room, do you know what I see? Four more years,” Guilfoyle said.
Trump is facing an impeachment inquiry initiated by the U.S. House of Representatives in light of a whistleblower complaint claiming Trump said he would withhold millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine unless President Volodymyr Zelensky‘s initiated an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden, a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination to face Trump in the 2020 election.
Although Trump’s presidency has been rife with controversy, and his aggregate approval ratings have dipped below the Obama Administration’s at its lowest, the Trump campaign has amassed a sizable cache of contributions – $124 million in total to bankroll his 2020 reelection campaign, according to the Federal Elections Commission.
Tuesday’s event marked the return of Parscale, who made his name as a digital media consultant, designing and developing websites for local businesses and other organizations. In 2015, Parscale’s agency Parscale Digital bid to provide the Trump campaign with a suite of digital services. Parscale eventually rose to become Trump’s digital media director ahead of the 2016 election. His ad-buying strategy, particularly on Facebook and other social media channels, is credited for helping Trump to his upset win.
Parscale called Democrats in Washington, D.C. “crazy, liberal socialists,” saying he was blind to what he called a liberal political scene in the nation’s capital while living in San Antonio.
“And I thought our mayor was bad. He only turned away about $100 million because of his own political needs,” Parscale said in reference to the San Antonio City Council’s controversial decision not to bid to host the 2020 Republican National Convention.
Parscale touted the growth of the Trump campaign’s volunteer and donor base as it ramps up toward the 2020 election. The campaign manager said the campaign’s budget in Minnesota was just tens of thousands of dollars in 2016, and the regional director assigned to that state was moved to Colorado. The budget for the Trump campaign in that state is now tens of millions of dollars, he said.
“Those kinds of numbers are how we win,” he said.
Bobby Garcia-Guidroz, a Bexar County Republican Party precinct chair, said after the event he thinks it will be an uphill battle for the president to win the vote in San Antonio, which favored Hillary Clinton in 2016. Garcia-Guidroz, however, remarked on how much more organized his party is this go-round, thanks in part to the fundraising prowess of the Trump campaign.
Taking the stage for about 20 minutes, Trump Jr. lambasted Democrats, criticized the media, and implored the gathered supporters to contribute to Trump’s reelection. Trump Jr. repeated a familiar line from his father’s 2016 stump speeches: “What do you have to lose?”
“America, you gave him a chance, and he has delivered on those promises,” he said. “Now, what do you have to lose? A lot.”
The president did not attend Tuesday’s event but is expected to headline a rally set for Thursday evening in the American Airlines Center in Dallas.
