Brad Parscale, campaign manager for President Donald Trump's re-election campaign, speaks on the phone ahead a campaign rally inside of the Knapp Center arena at Drake University on January 30, 2020 in Des Moines, Iowa. President Donald Trump will later host a campaign rally at Drake University ahead of the Iowa Caucuses.
Brad Parscale out as Trump's campaign manager
01:30 - Source: CNN
CNN  — 

President Donald Trump’s campaign has canceled a series of advertisement buys over the next few days as they review their messaging strategy, a senior campaign official told CNN.

The decision comes after the campaign demoted former campaign manager Brad Parscale and elevated current campaign manager Bill Stepien. The move to promote Stepien and demote Parscale took place on July 15, a little more than two weeks ago.

“With the leadership change in the campaign, there’s understandably a review and fine-tuning of the campaign’s strategy. We’ll be back on the air shortly, even more forcefully exposing Joe Biden as a puppet of the radical left-wing,” a senior campaign official told CNN.

The decision was first reported by NBC News.

The Trump campaign has often highlighted their ongoing media campaign. The campaign has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in TV and digital ads in battleground states across the country.

While a significant portion of the Trump campaign ad spending has been used to tout the President’s accomplishments in office, ads have become darker as the President’s approval numbers dip precipitously, sounding the alarm on an ominous future in a hypothetical Joe Biden administration.

Trump has framed his new strategy as an appeal to law-and-order messaging, after protests and riots in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

In one ad, titled “Defund the Police,” the campaign envisions a dystopian future state where the wait time for a police response reaches up to five days, warning, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

The campaign has relied heavily on a spot that falsely claims that Biden wants to strip money from police departments across the country. The ad warns of a coming “radical left-wing mob.”

Under Stepien’s management, the campaign also attempted to debut a new tone from the President, with Trump encouraging mask use and focusing more prominently on fighting the Covid-19 pandemic.

But the President undercut his own campaign’s attempts at a reset almost immediately, again encouraging the use of hydroxychloroquine, against the advice of medical professionals, to combat the virus and amplifying a doctor from Houston who believes, among other things, that gynecological problems are the result of dream sex with demons.

In a series of tweets Wednesday and Thursday, Trump also sowed doubt surrounding the vote-by-mail system in America and suggested that the election may need to be delayed, prompting immediate and bipartisan pushback.

This story has been updated with additional background information.