Trump wanted to bury Biden after the primary. Now he can’t.Trump's campaign is neck-deep in cash, but now it can't run an anti-Biden smear campaign with Fox News and Senate Republicans as a force multiplier. It can't call him senile and corrupt on every TV channel and Facebook page in America. The president actually has to run on his record, particularly his coronavirus record. Poor baby!
President Donald Trump’s top political advisers in recent weeks envisioned unleashing a massive advertising campaign against Joe Biden to define him for the general election before he had a chance to recover from the primary.
Then the novel coronavirus arrived.
With the death toll rising and daily life grinding to a halt, Trump’s sprawling political operation has put on hold any plans to use its nine-figure war chest to unload on the former vice president. The strategy, mimicking the playbook of Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign against Mitt Romney, was aimed at crippling the lesser-funded Biden before he could unify the Democratic Party behind him and marshal his forces for November.
... the Trump campaign has been essentially frozen in place by the virus, and ... there are currently no plans in place for a pricey anti-Biden ad campaign.
This will be one of Trump's many excuses if he loses in November: not just that the coronavirus killed his precious stock market rally, but that his campaign was never able to "vet" Biden.
And that, of course, will be the right-wing line (and quite possibly the mainstream media line) if there's a Biden presidency: that he was never vetted.
But imagine a campaign with limited opportunities for right-wing smears. Imagine a Democrat not spending months being attacked on irrelevancies -- inventing the Internet, Swift Boats, private email servers.
It could be almost like democracy in a civilized country.
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