Hi, this is Austin and Hannah calling from Bloomington, Indiana. We just got done doing our daily workout while listening to the MPR politics daily workout playlist on Spotify.

This podcast was recorded at. Yeah, it is a 210 Eastern on Thursday, July 16th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. All right, here's the show.

If you do not know about this, we have a playlist of workout music that we all all listen to with the podcast in it on Spotify. Danielle, I was too embarrassed to contribute, but I have finally contributed to the next round.

Yes, I haven't looked yet. This is so exciting.

Mara, we need your workout music on the playlist next. Oh, I've been listening to Hamilton, the, you know, the filmed version of the play of the musical. Oh, I have watched it a couple times already.

Hey there. It's the MPR politics podcast. I'm Scott Detro. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Danielle Kurtz. I've been I cover politics. I'm Mara Laiasson. I'm the National Political Correspondent.

All right. So as is well established on this podcast, President Trump is trailing in the polls by a lot. So last night his campaign tried to do something about it. They sideline campaign manager Brad Parscale and they replaced him with Bill Steppian. Mara, this is kind of seemed inevitable for a while. Right.

Yes, Parscale was on the outs. People were criticizing him for making so much money on the Trump campaign for injecting himself into Trump commercials being too high profile. That's something that the president doesn't like at all.

But on the other hand, we've seen so much turmoil in the Trump campaign in 2016. He went through a lot of campaign managers and also in the Trump White House. This is kind of par for the course.

Don't forget the real campaign manager is Donald Trump, just like his he's his own press secretary and communications director. And Jared Kushner, his son-in-law is still really running the campaign.

So I don't think this shake up means that we're going to see a lot of difference in the president's strategy is what you're saying here that for another candidate, this sort of shake up would make a bigger difference.

But remember, turmoil in chaos is a feature, not a bug of Donald Trump's operation.

And we should point out that Joe Biden also changed campaign manager shortly after he secured the Democratic nomination.

Let's talk about something else that has happened in the last day or so. And this seems to be like a bigger deal.

The Republican National Convention, I think, has really symbolized the COVID quicksand that President Trump finds himself in.

He kept insisting on having a full scale event. He even moved the location of the rally part of the convention from Charlotte to Jacksonville.

He wanted a big crowd, but this morning the RNC kind of conceded to reality.

What is this latest plan and how much is it scaled down?

Scale down a lot. They're only going to have 2500 people will be allowed to the first couple of days of the convention.

But then on the last night when Donald Trump accepts the re-nomination of this party, there will be 7,000 people in the arena, whichever arena he chooses.

This is not the giant, raucous, rally kind of re-nomination by acclamation that the president wanted.

And he has little by little. The RNC has kind of bowed to the COVID reality.

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