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.
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.
“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.
Moreover, some Republicans are eager to recycle some of Trump's 2016 playbook, when he depicted Hillary Clinton as a Washington insider looking to enrich herself, by making similar accusations against Biden and his son, Hunter, for the younger man's work in Ukraine and China.
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