A super PAC boosting Joe Biden is hitting President Trump without using the two-term vice president’s name, instead ripping the incumbent by comparing him to other Republicans who managed many a crisis.
Unite the Country late Tuesday debuted a new 30-second spot called “Crisis comes,” which focuses on Trump’s response to the coronavirus crisis. The group is pushing it out across the nation in a seven-figure ad buy.
“Crisis comes to every presidency. We don’t blame them for that,” the narrator says over images of Presidents George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan. “What matters is how they handle it.”
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The narrator then criticizes Trump for describing the COVID-19 virus as a “hoax,” accusing the White House of allowing the novel respiratory illness to “spread unchecked across America.” He also dredges up disputed claims about how the administration “eliminated the U.S. pandemic response team.”
“Crisis comes to every president. This one failed,” he says.
Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh slammed Biden’s allies for offering “nothing but partisan sniping from the sidelines,” undermining “the federal response to the crisis by misinforming and frightening people.”
“This ad contains the already disproven lie that President Trump called the virus a ‘hoax,’ when in fact he was referring to Democrat and media criticisms of the federal response as ‘their new hoax,’” Murtaugh wrote in a statement.
He added, “Americans can see that President Trump is out front and leading this nation and is the clear choice to see us through the crisis.”
The spread of the coronavirus and its public health and economic ramifications are predicted to define the 2020 general election. The outbreak has already reshaped the tail end of Democratic presidential primary, forcing presumptive nominee Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders off the campaign trail and delaying upcoming contests. It could also possibly derail the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
The ad breaks a brief moratorium on political advertising. While Trump’s general job approval rating averages in the negatives, his COVID-19 response is higher, with 49.2% approve to 45.4% disapprove, according to RealClearPolitics data.
