Trump’s former campaign manager assisted Honduran presidential candidate

By KENNETH P. VOGEL, DAVID C. ADAMS and JACK NICAS

President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager assisted the campaign of a right-wing Honduran presidential candidate who was endorsed by the American president and is now in a razor-thin contest to win the election.

Brad Parscale, who ran Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign until he was replaced less than four months before the election, worked with consultants who helped run Nasry Asfura’s presidential campaign before last Sunday’s election.

In the days before the election, Trump endorsed Asfura, then announced the pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, a former Honduran president who hails from the same conservative party as Asfura and had been convicted last year of working with cartels to flood the United States with cocaine.

Trump’s moves injected chaos into the campaign’s last stretch. Election results were still being tallied as of press time Thursday, with a very narrow margin separating Asfura, 67, and Salvador Nasralla, 72, a sportscaster from another right-wing party.

Parscale acknowledged that he advised the campaign, but said that he had nothing to do with the endorsement or the pardon.

“I had no contact at all with the administration, including the president, about the election in Honduras or the pardon,” he told The New York Times.

Parscale’s involvement in the campaign offers a glimpse into the ways that right-wing political interests around the world have sought to affiliate with the American president.

It underscores Trump’s emergence as the leader of a populist wave sweeping the globe, as well as his increasing willingness to meddle in foreign politics on behalf of politicians who reflect his nationalist rhetoric.

The trend has also created lucrative opportunities for his associates and former advisers, who have advised politicians seeking to cast themselves as Trump-like figures in Albania, Republika Srpska and elsewhere.

There is long tradition of American political consultants heading overseas for big paydays after their candidates occupy presidential office. For foreign politicians, hiring operatives with ties to Washington’s ruling party can create the impression that they are in the good graces of the U.S president and have the influence to secure increased aid or trade with the United States.

There is an added incentive with Trump, who has used the levers of government to punish perceived foes at home and abroad.

Parscale is well positioned to capitalize. He runs companies called Campaign Nucleus and EyesOver that process and analyze data for political groups and other clients.

He has pitched his services to President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia, but nothing has come of it yet. He has had more success in South America, where he joined with Fernando Cerimedo, an influential political operative in the region.

The two men have been partners in a Buenos Aires, Argentina-based political consultancy called Numen for a couple of years.

The firm advised the campaigns of Trump allies, including President Javier Milei of Argentina, for whom Numen worked in 2023, according to a Justice Department filing, as well as the successful campaign this year of President Rodrigo Paz of Bolivia.

Parscale assisted during the Bolivian election, traveling to the region during the campaign. He helped Numen’s team on the ground use data tools developed by his companies.

Parscale did not travel to the region during the Honduran election, but he advised Numen’s team on how to use data to target voters, according to Cerimedo, who became a prominent figure in Asfura’s campaign.

“Brad set up all the infrastructure that I work with,” Cerimedo said in a text message.

Parscale argued that the tools from Campaign Nucleus and EyesOver helped his clients in Bolivia and Honduras.

In a social media post last week, Trump called Asfura “the only real friend of Freedom in Honduras” and pledging to work with him to fight narco-trafficking “and bring needed aid to the people of Honduras.”

The endorsement was widely seen as boosting Asfura’s campaign by signaling the prospect that he could usher in better relations between the two countries after four years of hostility.

But the pardon of Hernández — which was aggressively pushed by another Trump ally, Roger Stone — was viewed as a liability for Asfura, associating the candidate with an unpopular former president of the same party who is widely seen as corrupt.

Stone has told the Times he was not compensated for his pardon advocacy, which began months ago and culminated in his sending Trump a letter that Hernández wrote in late October pleading for clemency.

Asked about Stone’s role in the pardon, the White House pointed to comments by Trump in which he called Hernández’s conviction “a Biden administration setup,” though the investigation that led to his imprisonment began years earlier, before Trump was elected the first time.

The pardon also seems at odds with the Trump administration’s efforts to stanch the drug trade through the potentially illegal bombing of boats in the waters around Venezuela suspected of trying to smuggle drugs into the United States. The administration has provided little evidence of its accusations.

By Monday evening, election officials said that Asfura trailed Nasralla by 0.6 percentage points, or 14,400 votes, with nearly 80% of ballots counted.

Asfura’s party, the National Party, said its data showed that Asfura led by 2 percentage points, or 77,000 votes, with 92% of ballots counted. The reason for the discrepancy was unclear.

The National Party posted a video Tuesday night of Cerimedo analyzing partial results to predict that Asfura would ultimately win.

Like Trump and his allies, Cerimedo has a history of claiming election fraud to explain results that he disfavors.

In Brazil in 2022, Cerimedo posted a video that went viral explaining why he thought the election had been rigged against the right-wing former president, Jair Bolsonaro, an ally of Trump’s. Brazil’s federal police later recommended criminal charges against Cerimedo, accusing him of pushing a false narrative about a stolen election that was part of a broader plot for Bolsonaro to hold on to power. Cerimedo was never charged.

The following year, before the Argentine election, Cerimedo warned of potential voter fraud, but dropped the suggestion after his candidate, Milei, easily won.

In Honduras, Trump has echoed unsubstantiated suggestions that a potential loss by Asfura would be tainted by fraud.

“Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election,” he wrote on social media on Monday night. “If they do, there will be hell to pay!”