President Trump’s reelection campaign has readied a battery of negative advertising targeting presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, starting with the former vice president’s record on China.
The online, broadcast, and cable television ad buy is reported to have cost more than $10 million and has the president’s backing, according to Politico.
Campaign manager Brad Parscale shared on Thursday a one-minute video that suggests Biden’s son leveraged his father’s influence in office to net a lucrative business deal.
The ad, titled “Biden: Dangerous for America,” also shows Biden seeming to question China’s geopolitical ambitions. “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,” Biden says in the clip. Another segment shows Biden as vice president saying: “The growth of China is overwhelmingly in our interest.”
A second clip shared by Parscale shows Biden caught in a lie about his academic background and achievements.
“For nearly three years we have been building a juggernaut campaign (Death Star),” Parscale wrote on Twitter. The campaign would “press FIRE for the first time” in a few days, he said.
While the campaign has shared clips attacking Biden online for months, the ad buy marks a major escalation as the president looks toward the general election. Trump traveled this week to Arizona, and states have begun rolling back stay-at-home orders put in place to slow the spread of coronavirus in the hopes of reopening their economies.
Trump is gearing up for a tough general election fight.
With less than six months until Election Day, more than 30 million people in the United States are out of work. Meanwhile, Biden leads Trump nationally by more than 5 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics average. A Biden campaign ad released last month sought to paint Trump as soft on China, where the coronavirus was first discovered.
The economic fallout has forced Trump’s campaign team to retool a message that prior to the crisis focused on the economic prosperity accrued under the president’s leadership.
The campaign is now instead positioning Trump as the candidate best equipped to go head-to-head with Beijing and resurrect the economy. The president took on China in a trade war and blamed its government for the pandemic.
By contrast, Biden, as a senator and then vice president, supported trade deals with China and visited with Chinese President Xi Jinping. And Biden’s son Hunter inked a $1 billion business deal with a Chinese state-backed private equity firm weeks after joining his father on an official visit to China in 2013, the campaign has claimed.
