Campaigns adjust to Trump’s illness
President’s bid for reelection dealt one more serious blow
Joe Biden and Donald Trump face the challenge of finding the right tone for their campaigns as the president remains hospitalized with COVID-19 a month before the Nov. 3 election.
Because of Trump’s illness, each candidate now enters the final stretch of the campaign having to adjust messages that had become rote.
For Biden, that means treading more carefully in assailing his ailing opponent’s response to a pandemic that cost more than 208,000 lives and millions of jobs.
For Trump, that translates into acknowledging the peril of a virus he has repeatedly claimed would eventually disappear.
The former vice president made the first move.
After testing negative for coronavirus early Friday, he continued with a planned stop in Michigan while Trump was resting at the White House. That left voters with the split-screen image Friday afternoon of Trump heading to a hospital at the moment Biden was selling his economic plan to union workers in a crucial battleground state.
Yet, Biden avoided seeming callous by bookending his remarks with wellwishes and prayers for Trump and his wife, Melania, who is also infected, before pivoting into his standard pleas for adherence to scientists’ guidelines for lessening the pandemic’s spread.
Mostly gone were Biden’s regular digs at Trump for mishandling the virus that also collapsed a strong economy, and his routine remarks that Trump’s policies directly led to deaths and unemployment.
“We need to do better in
dealing with this pandemic,” was as sharp a rebuke as Biden offered Friday.
“This is not a matter of politics,” he said. “It is a bracing reminder for all of us that we must take this virus seriously. It is not going away.”
It re ma i n s u n c l e a r whether Trump’s infection will fundamentally change the race. For months, Biden has held a steady lead over the president in national polls and only a tiny fraction of the electorate remains undecided.
Most immediately, the test result will pull Trump and his closest family members off the campaign trail, as his team has canceled future events. Vice President Mike Pence will still hold events, the campaign said.
Trump’s reelection effort had a different messaging problem, one compounded by campaign manager Bill
Stepien testing positive for COVID-19. After seven months of minimizing the virus, disdaining masks or social distancing, and promising the disease would “magically disappear,” the White House itself was now possibly spreading it.
Trump’s trusted aide Hope Hicks fell ill Wednesday, and Trump was tested and diagnosed late Thursday.
While Biden spent the first months of the pandemic campaigning from his home, drawing derision from Trump for “hiding in his basement,” Trump was now the one locked down, unable to do the signature rallies that connect him to his base of loyal supporters.
The mood both in the White House and the campaign was bleak, according to four people familiar with the situation, and they said the outlook, after months of trailing Biden in national and many state polls, was
that they may not come back politically.
One aide expressed disappointment privately that Trump didn’t quarantine as soon as Hicks was diagnosed. Instead, Trump held a fundraiser at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, angering one of his top donors.
Dan Eberhart, who donated $100,000 to Trump’s reelection in June, said in a phone interview Friday that the president was “reckless” and imperils muchneeded future fundraisers in the short time that remained. Trump should have sent a surrogate instead, said Eberhart, the chief executive officer of Canary Drilling Services LLC.
Doug Heye, a Republican strategist, said Biden struck the right tone in responding to Trump’s diagnosis.
“There’s so much negativity out there on this,” he said. “It’s smart of Biden to stay above the fray.”
The sudden change also throws into question whether Trump and Biden will participate in the next debate, scheduled for Oct. 15 in Miami. Public health guidelines recommend that people who contract coronavirus should isolate for at least 14 days, and Trump was diagnosed 12 days before the next face-off.
Trump was transported to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Friday afternoon, where he is expected to stay for a few days. Trump’s diagnosis also comes after he mocked Biden during the debate for always wearing a mask.
Trump’s positive test result couldn’t have come at a worse time for his campaign. Not only lagging in the polls, Trump is having trouble raising money and the New York Times reported last week that he had paid only $750 in federal taxes in 2016 and 2017.
Until Labor Day, Biden kept a limited public schedule, only holding small, socially distant events in Delaware or Pennsylvania.
Unless delivering a speech from a distance, the former vice president has always worn a mask. His campaign created a public health advisory board, led by David Kessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Vivek Murthy, the former surgeon general, to advise on the safety of campaigning.
After one encounter with Trump, Biden may not be out of the woods. His negative COVID-19 test is not conclusive, as experts say it could take days for him to develop enough of the virus for a test to detect it if he did in fact contract it.
Biden is not slated to travel again until Monday, when he is scheduled to campaign in Miami and participate in a town hall hosted by NBC News.