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Apparent 33% Pay Cut For Campaign Manager Hints At Money Trouble For Trump

From left, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Eric Trump and campaign manager Bill Stepien listen as President Donald Trump speaks to a crowd of supporters on Aug. 20, 2020, in Old Forge, Pennsylvania. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
From left, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Eric Trump and campaign manager Bill Stepien listen as President Donald Trump speaks to a crowd of supporters on Aug. 20, 2020, in Old Forge, Pennsylvania. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

WASHINGTON — Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien appears to have taken a 33% pay cut ― $5,000 a month — when he accepted his promotion this summer, another sign of money trouble for a campaign that spent over $1 billion only to have the incumbent president behind in the polls.

Stepien had been deputy campaign manager before he moved up to the top job on July 15 — the day before his firm received $10,000 rather than the $15,000 it had been getting monthly since December 2018, according to a HuffPost review of Federal Election Commission filings.

Neither Stepien nor others in the Trump campaign responded to numerous queries on the matter. If $10,000 a month is, in fact, Stepien’s total new compensation, it would mean he is making far less than the communications director, the press secretary, a number of “senior advisers,” and possibly even the wife of one Trump son and the girlfriend of another.

“That’s a humiliating blow,” said Rick Wilson, a longtime Florida GOP consultant and Trump critic.

“Plainly, they have big money problems and I am guessing Stepien cut his own salary as a prelude to cutting others,” said David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist behind former President Barack Obama’s successful 2008 campaign. “They made a big bet that they could invest early in building a small-dollar digital universe to compete with the Democrats that would pay off late. Well, now it’s late, and they seem to be low on cash.”

The possibility of a cash crunch in the final weeks of the 2020 presidential race has been swirling since the Trump campaign canceled television advertising it had previously scheduled for the final week of August, during the Republican National Convention. The speculation heightened further when Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden announced record-breaking fundraising for that month, with $364 million in contributions — $154 million more than the Trump campaign announced some days later.

“We don’t have a...

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