With Sen. Bernie Sanders out of the picture, the general election presidential matchup between Joe Biden and President Trump is all but officially set.
Now knowing who their opponent will be, the Trump campaign wasted no time cranking out a hard-hitting ad on Thursday against Biden that centers on his and his son Hunter’s China connections at a time when more people are learning about the origins of the coronavirus: Wuhan, China.
Not only are they learning about the virus’s origins, they’re learning more about how China’s whistleblowers were either silenced or mysteriously disappeared, and how China lied about the way the Wuhan coronavirus was transmitted in an effort to cover for their wrongdoing.
In fact, as more people learn of China’s actions, consensus is growing among Republicans and Democrats outside of Washington D.C. that China is responsible for the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus and cannot be trusted:
Yet a new poll shows that, outside the Beltway, the coronavirus crisis is actually bringing Americans together on the China issue. Republicans and Democrats now largely agree that the Chinese government bears responsibility for the spread of the pandemic, that it can’t be trusted on this or any other issue, and that the U.S. government should maintain a tough position on China on trade and overall, especially if Beijing again falters in its commitments.“It’s as much of a consensus issue as you can get in today’s divided world,” said Mark Penn, chairman of the Harris Poll. “Overall, there’s very little trust for anything that the Chinese government says or does, especially its premier. Xi Jinping has less than half the credibility of President Trump in this poll.”
Capitalizing on this, the ad contains numerous clips of Biden either praising or downplaying the threat from China, and it shows the former vice president interacting warmly with China’s president Xi Jinping at different events.
Throughout the ad, you hear Biden’s own words, such as when he called Trump a “xenophobic” after he implemented China travel restrictions at the end of January in response to the outbreak, a move the ad notes Biden is now praising.
The one-minute video also points out that China has been hoarding medical supplies since January, including critical PPE that would help protect healthcare workers in other countries like ours who are combating the Wuhan coronavirus.
It also insinuates that Biden and his family have a personal financial interest in China through his son Hunter who reportedly “inked a billion dollar deal with a subsidiary of the Bank of China.” As this is mentioned, a blurb from an October 2019 New York Post story is shown: “Joe Biden met with Hunter’s Chinese partners.”
Watch the video below:
What’s not mentioned in the ad but which is probably coming in a future one is how the same country Joe Biden has praised also falsely blamed the U.S. military for bringing the virus to Wuhan.
In the weeks ahead, look for the Biden campaign to try and reframe the issue to make it look like Trump is a recent convert to the anti-China camp simply because he’s had to walk a fine line between having a diplomatic relationship with Jinping and pushing back when necessary. But Biden won’t have much of an argument on that front. Trump, unlike Biden, has had an often adversarial relationship with China over substantial trade and tariff disagreements.
As Hot Air’s Ed Morissey writes, now is not a good time for any Democrat to be a China apologist, but especially so for Joe Biden:
This is a bad year to have been a Beijing apologist. Team Trump will beat Biden like a drum over this all year long — and if they don’t, it will be the worst case of political malpractice since, er, Hillary Clinton forgot Wisconsin existed.
The United States’ relationship with China is going to be *the* major campaign issue in the months to come, well after America begins the process of getting back to normal. Trump is going to be loaded for bear, armed with the knowledge that every person in America who has suffered from the virus or who has died from it did so because of deliberate actions from the Chinese government to keep the spread of it quiet.
China’s continued deceptions even as the virus spread for months far and wide across the globe hampered other countries’ efforts to contain and combat it. More importantly, China’s disinformation campaign has, to date, resulted in nearly 1,700,000 becoming sick, with over 100,000 deaths worldwide – including close to 19,000 here in the U.S.
Biden might want to make sure his campaign surrogates are on standby, because Biden himself has had an incoherent message on China over the last three months, and that’s not likely to change as the campaign season wears on.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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