Trump campaign tests lines of attack on Biden
NEW YORK — Air Force One is mostly grounded. Fundraisers are canceled. And the closest thing to a campaign rally is President Donald Trump’s nightly coronavirus briefing.
The president’s reelection campaign has been thoroughly upended by the coronavirus. But Trump’s team has revived a plan to quickly define Joe Biden, painting the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee as a Washington lifer, focusing on his links to China and insinuating that he is not up to the job.
Though the nation is fixated on the White House’s response to the pandemic, the Trump campaign is prioritizing attacks on Biden rather than selling the president’s handling of the crisis. Worried about declines in support in several battleground states, the campaign is using its financial war chest to try to drive down Biden’s standing by hammering his ties to Beijing and, soon, reviving accusations that the former vice president and his son are corrupt.
“This is a referendum on how the president handles the pandemic,” said Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. “It’s about making clear that Joe Biden is the worst possible guy for this time.”
The playbook was written months ago.
The Trump campaign would spend the first months of 2020 deploying its extensive social media outreach and some of the more than $170 million at its disposal to pummel his Democratic opponent. The shock-and-awe plan would be similar to the one President Barack Obama’s team executed in the spring of 2012 when it portrayed Mitt Romney as a heartless corporate raider.
The campaign initially sought to define Biden as a corrupt Beltway insider after spending 40 years in Washington.
But when COVID-19 reached America’s shores after ravaging China, campaign advisers decided to prioritize scorching Biden for his ties and past comments regarding that country, according to four people close to the campaign who were not authorized to publicly discuss the private deliberations and spoke on condition of anonymity.
It’s a risky strategy since Trump himself has faced questions about his approach to Beijing. But it’s one that the campaign hopes will tie Biden more closely to the pandemic, while also reinforcing his past support of free trade deals, which are unpopular in swaths of the Midwest that will be critical battlegrounds during the general election.
A scathing ad ran on television and on Facebook. America First Action, the principal super PAC behind Trump’s reelection effort, spent $10 million on ads in swing states juxtaposing old clips of Biden speaking favorably about China with allegations that Beijing “stole American manufacturing and hoarded our emergency stockpile.” And the message was amplified on Fox
News and in other conservative media.
“The American people understood that we are in a hot information and economic war with China,” said Bannon, who hosts a radio show airing on conservative networks. “Biden was empowered and trusted by President Obama on his ‘pivot to Asia’ to handle China. He failed. The exacerbation of the problem with China came under Joe Biden’s watch.”
Some in Trump’s orbit, including senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, have argued against the China attacks in favor of highlighting the president’s leadership of the recovery. And Trump himself was presented ads making that attack, which were slated to run in a major media buy, but held off giving the authorization.
The Biden campaign has responded by pointing to inconsistencies with the president’s handling of China and the pandemic as a whole, which has killed more than 46,000 Americans and sent the economy toward a recession.
“Clever nicknames and tired attack lines he’s been workshopping the past year will not erase the magnitude of his failures during this crisis,” said TJ Ducklo, a Biden campaign spokesman.