The Trump campaign is working hard to get inside former Vice President Joe Biden’s head on the day he accepts the Democratic presidential nomination. Biden is one of the many Democrats who live rent-free inside Trump’s head, so his campaign is hoping to return the favor with a campaign event outside Biden’s Scranton, Pennsylvania, birthplace and a digital ad campaign focusing on Biden’s son Hunter.
Trump plans a detailed anti-Biden speech in Scranton as part of the effort to win Pennsylvania, a state crucial to his 2016 Electoral College victory but one in which he trails in current polling. Biden’s birthplace already made an appearance in the Democratic National Convention, when Sen. Bob Casey cast Pennsylvania’s votes in the nominating roll call in front of it.
The Biden campaign dismissed Trump’s trolling, with a spokesman saying he “put the health of countless families across the Keystone State in danger and plunged the strong economy he inherited from the Obama-Biden Administration into a tailspin.” Now, “[t]his sideshow is a pathetic attempt to distract from the fact that Trump’s presidency stands for nothing but crises, lies, and division.”
The Trump campaign’s ad focused on Hunter Biden is part of a high seven-figure digital advertising buy that will include 96 hours straight of YouTube advertising time as well as major ad buys on sites like Fox News, The Washington Post, and the Daily Caller. Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler tweeted about the campaign, writing that “the Trump campaign has taken over the @washingtonpost home page with ads that take you to a series of YouTube videos that make claims that we have fact-checked as false.” Not that the Post’s letting that stand in its way, apparently.
Attacks on Hunter Biden continue to be the Trump campaign’s way to try to make Joe Biden look corrupt—there was a whole impeachment around those efforts, you may recall—and to make Biden look weak on China. A Biden campaign spokesman responded with a reminder of some of the facts around Trump’s relationship with China: “Trump begged Xi to help him win re-election, drove American manufacturing into a recession, struck a weak trade deal with China that they are not even living up to, and even gave his explicit support for concentration camps there. That's precisely why China's officials are openly pulling for him to win re-election.”
Other Trump campaign digital ads will try to portray Biden as senile.
Imagine if the Biden campaign thought all it had against Trump was his kids’ business dealings and his mental sharpness. That wouldn’t be a very strong case—and yet even on those fronts Trump has chosen for battle, the case against Trump would be far stronger than the case against Biden.
