James Carville Slam Dunk

Carville: Look what his campaign is doing. They’re a pack of grifters. His campaign manager got two condos, a Ferrari, a yacht, a Range Rover and they’re all just fleecing the campaign. This is all about making money and they’re going in there and giving him fake polls. pic.twitter.com/Xj5Bk18GeG

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) May 7, 2020

So let me explain the beautiful operation James Carville (Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign chief strategist) is really pulling off here.

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale is an accidental genius. He showed up with no aptitude or experience and Trump pulled him into his band of merry mutants, dildos, rejects, loudmouths, and mooks, appointing him digital media director of his 2016 campaign, a just-pretend operation for a "candidate" in it just for some extra cachet and moolah.

Parscale - who knew? - turned out to be a natural. It's a big reason Trump won. So Trump made him campaign manager for 2020, but all is not well in paradise:

As he huddled with advisers on Friday evening, President Donald Trump was still fuming over his sliding poll numbers and the onslaught of criticism he was facing for suggesting a day earlier that ingesting disinfectant might prove effective against coronavirus.

Within moments, the President was shouting -- not at the aides in the room, but into the phone -- at his campaign manager Brad Parscale, three people familiar with the matter told CNN. Shifting the blame away from himself, Trump berated Parscale for a recent spate of damaging poll numbers, even at one point threatening to sue Parscale.

This was fantastic news. It would be great if Parscale joined the long list of legit talents booted by Trump for failure to be properly shitty/subservient. So rascals like my man Rick Wilson immediately began trying to goad Trump into booting him:

But then Carville went on MSNBC last night and showed us how it's done. He delivered his spiel with conviction because, following the first rule of manipulation and trolling, it had the benefit of incidentally being true. As Carville also notes in the interview, Trump's polling is awful, all elections since 2016 have gone poorly for Republicans, Parscale is massively enriching himself, and Trump's people are laughing at him while delivering the ego-fluffing he self-defeatingly demands. It's all true, and that's what gives it power. Hell, it took even me a minute to recognize Carville's trolling here, and I'm in on this ("crumbling empire" was some next-level brilliance).

But if the election is in the bag, one might ask, why try to goad Trump into firing Parscale? Because, as Carville also says in the same interview, "Dems don't need to just win, they must end the scourge of Trumpism" by a giant victory.

Here's the full interview: