New York:Accusations of a deep state conspiracy. Allegations of personal and family corruption. Painting an opponent as a Washington insider not to be trusted.
It’s '2016' again. Or at least that's President Donald Trump's hope.
Trump and his allies are dusting off the playbook that helped defeat Hillary Clinton, reviving it in recent days as they try to frame 2020 as an election between a dishonest establishment politician and a political outsider being targeted for taking on the system. This time, however, the so-called outsider is the sitting President of the United States.
Eager to distract from the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 89,000 Americans and crippled the economy, Trump and his advisers have started their fog machine again, amplified by conservative media as it was during the Russia probe and impeachment investigation. Their latest target: the president’s likely general election foe Joe Biden in an urgent effort to drive up his negative approval ratings less the six months before the election.
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The strategy already centered on playing up allegations that Biden’s son, Hunter, profited off the vice presidency. Trump recently added Biden’s ties to China, the country the White House now squarely blames for the spread of COVID-19. And it kicked into overdrive last week when Trump seized upon revelations that Biden was informed of the investigation of ties between Russia and Michael Flynn, a senior Trump official, as evidence of a plot to undermine a presidency before it began.
Flynn’s so-called unmasking, a common request by a government official for an intelligence agency to identify someone in contact with a foreigner under surveillance, became the centerpiece of unprecedented attacks by Trump on his predecessor. Trump said, without evidence, that Barack Obama — and, by extension, his vice president — had perpetrated the greatest political scam, hoax in the history of our country.
“This was all Obama. This was all Biden. These people were corrupt — the whole thing was corrupt — and we caught them,” Trump said. “People should be going to jail for this stuff.”
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The Biden campaign quickly pushed back, denying wrongdoing and noting the routine practice of unmasking to help officials understand intelligence. They're painting Trump's reaction as a tired play that will have little effect on voters who've watched three years of a scattershot presidency now struggling to handle the pandemic.
“We have a president who doesn’t want to talk about the central issue in this campaign right now,” said Mike Donilon, one of Biden’s longest-serving advisers. “This isn’t new. It’s not like Trump started attacking the vice president today or yesterday. He’s been at him all year long.”
The president, Donilon asserted, falls back on an all-out effort to try to take people away from what they’re living through, describing a tactic that he acknowledged has succeeded in the past in terms of throwing up distractions and smokescreen.
Trump’s ability to distract, deflect, and dominate headlines remains peerless among politicians.
Four years ago, among his countless broadsides against Clinton, were accusations that her use of a private email server as secretary of state-endangered national security and charges that she used her government connections to enrich her family through the nonprofit Clinton Foundation.
For many voters, the insinuations worked, underscoring existing doubts about the integrity of a woman who'd been in the public eye for decades and, along with her husband, the former president, had struggled at times with being viewed as trustworthy.