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IT TOOK A WHILE, BUT TRUMP HAS A PLAN. The final night of the Republican convention, on the South Lawn of the White House, wasn’t just an unprecedented event and perhaps the nation’s best fireworks show. It was also a formal notice that the Trump campaign, after much struggle, has settled on a way to attack Joe Biden in the last 66 days before the election.
“There is now a coherent strategy to take down Biden,” CNN liberal analyst Van Jones said shortly after the president finished his speech accepting the Republican nomination. The speech was long (70 minutes) and lost energy at times, but out of it emerged some of the president’s key attack lines.
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The first attack line is about jobs. “Joe Biden is not the savior of America’s soul,” Trump said. “He is the destroyer of America’s jobs, and if given the chance, he will be the destroyer of American Greatness. For 47 years, Joe Biden took donations of blue collar workers, gave them hugs and even kisses, told them he felt their pain — and then he flew back to Washington and voted to ship their jobs to China and many other distant lands.”
Biden’s “shameful” record includes votes for NAFTA and for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. “After those Biden calamities,” Trump said, “the United States lost one in four manufacturing jobs. The laid-off workers in Michigan, Ohio, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and many other states didn’t want Joe Biden’s hollow words of empathy. They wanted their jobs back.” Biden, the president said, “spent his entire career outsourcing the dreams of American workers.”
The second line of attack is about order and public safety. Trump noted that, during their convention, Biden and his fellow Democrats stayed silent about the riots and violence that have plagued some of the nation’s major cities. The president said the unity platform Biden signed with Sen. Bernie Sanders — Trump likes to call it the “manifesto” — would result in freed criminals flooding into American neighborhoods. “Make no mistake, if you give power to Joe Biden, the radical left will defund police departments all across America,” Trump said. “They will pass federal legislation to reduce law enforcement nationwide. They will make every city look like Democrat-run Portland, Oregon. No one will be safe in Biden’s America.”
The third line of attack is about Biden’s nearly half-a-century in Washington. Three times in his speech, Trump spoke the words “47 years” — as in the 47 years that Biden spent in the federal government in Washington. (Actually, it is 44 years; Biden took office in the Senate in 1973 and left the vice presidency in 2017 and has been in private life since then.) In any event, Trump took repeated aim at Biden’s long, long time in the nation’s capital.
“We have spent the last four years reversing the damage Joe Biden inflicted over the last 47 years,” Trump said when discussing his work to rebuild the military. On another occasion and on another topic, he said, “I have done more in three years for the black community than Joe Biden has done in 47 years.” And on yet another occasion he made the reference to Biden’s 47 years of taking the donations of blue collar workers quoted above. The message was clear: Joe Biden has been around too long.
Trump is clearly feeling more optimistic lately. In yesterday’s newsletter, he told me that back in February, he thought victory was assured, only to run into the coronavirus pandemic and the related economic plunge. For much of the summer, Biden has held a big lead in the polls, both nationally and in some key swing states. But now Trump appears to be getting his feet back under him. At the convention, he seemed confident that he has finally found the way to win against Biden in such a troubled year.
