New Trump Ad Suggests a Campaign Strategy Amid Crisis: Xenophobia
Nick Corasaniti, Jeremy W. Peters and Annie Karni The New York Times•April 11, 2020
Biden quietly widens lead over Trump in 2020 race: Reuters/Ipsos poll
President Donald Trump has kicked off his general election advertising campaign with a xenophobic attack ad against Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, the opening shot in a messaging war that is expected to be exceptionally ugly.
In a minute-long digital ad released late Thursday that relies heavily on imagery of China and people of Asian descent, the Trump campaign signaled the lines of attack it will use in its attempts to rally the president’s base and define Biden. The ad reprises accusations Trump has made that the former vice president’s family profited from his relationships with Chinese officials and presents selectively edited scenes and statements attempting to portray him as doddering and weak.
For the president and his allies, the approach represents their assessment of the race as it narrows into a one-on-one contest with Biden, the opponent who is least susceptible to their charges that the Democratic Party is too far outside the political mainstream.
The new ad also shows that while the country has changed drastically in recent weeks amid a national health crisis, the president has not. He continues to lead the nation and run his campaign the way he always has: by belittling his adversaries and exploiting racial discord.
While other presidents have used campaigns during periods of national trauma to try to unite the country, political strategists said that Trump was taking the opposite approach.
“They’re just going to run a white grievance campaign,” said Stuart Stevens, who worked on the presidential campaigns of the Republicans Mitt Romney and George W. Bush. “It’s not complicated. He’s losing with everybody but white men over 50,” Stevens added.
“Trump hasn’t changed,” he said. “He hasn’t changed in 30 years.”
Biden amplified that criticism with a statement Friday, saying, “The casual racism and regular xenophobia that we have seen from Trump and this Administration is a national scourge.”
“Donald Trump only knows how to speak to people’s fears, not their better angels,” he added.
Since the coronavirus started spreading in the United States, Trump has tried to steer the conversation over his response toward themes and issues he is most comfortable with like nationalism and border security. Until recently, he had been referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus.”
Now, with unfounded claims that Biden and his family have profited from below-board business deals with the Chinese, Trump is attempting to link his political rival to his chief geopolitical foe at a time when there is rising xenophobia and violence in the United States aimed at Chinese Americans.
“During America’s crisis, Biden protected China’s feelings,” the online ad says, presenting a montage of clips of Biden complimenting and praising the Chinese, including the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, and of a news segment accusing Biden of helping his son Hunter profit off Chinese investments.
The ad also includes an image of a smiling Biden standing alongside an Asian American man — an apparent attempt to suggest that the former president has an inappropriately cozy relationship with China. But the man in the image is a Chinese American, the former governor of Washington, Gary Locke, who also served as President Barack Obama’s commerce secretary and ambassador to China.
The picture, which appears briefly in between clips showing Biden socializing with Chinese officials and stammering through speeches, was taken at a 2013 event in Beijing where Locke and the former vice president appeared together.
The ad’s implication that Biden is soft on China is oddly timed, coming as Trump’s own stance toward China and Xi has been more positive. Trump has been complimenting Xi, and as recently as last week, the president described the two of them as close allies and good friends.
The Trump campaign defended using an image of an Asian American to illustrate Biden’s ties to the Chinese, saying it was selected simply because Hunter Biden accompanied his father on the 2013 trip to China. Trump has repeatedly accused him, without evidence, of using his father’s official visit to further his own business interests.
“The shot with the flags specifically places Biden in Beijing in 2013,” Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign spokesman, wrote on Twitter, referring to the picture with Locke. “It’s for a reason. That’s the Hunter Biden trip. Memory Lane for ol’ Joe.”
Murtaugh did not address the fact that Locke is not Chinese, or that the ad presents the image with no context or explanation.
Locke responded by accusing Trump of stoking hatred against Asian Americans. “The Trump team is making it worse,” he said in a written statement. “Asian Americans are Americans. Period.”
In recent weeks, Asian Americans have reported being physically attacked, yelled at and spit upon; organizations have begun to track the incidents. Trump’s rise has only pushed many Asian Americans further into the Democratic Party, though they were once considered a fairly reliable Republican demographic.
Some Democratic strategists said that the tone and nature of the Trump ad should serve as a wake-up call. The coronavirus pandemic and the human and economic suffering it has unleashed does not mean that politics as usual are on hiatus, they said.
“This should tell the Biden campaign and every other entity trying to beat Trump that we have to rethink the playbook,” said Kelly Gibson, a Democratic media strategist who advised the campaigns of Andrew Yang and Julián Castro. “So if Democrats don’t sink to his level, at least a little, we will be at a sizable disadvantage. You can’t beat fear with logic; it has never worked and it will never work.”
The Trump campaign’s approach is a coarser version of the strategy that incumbent presidents typically deploy against their opponents: try to define them early before they get a chance to define themselves.
“What the Trump campaign wants to do is introduce on their terms, or in the case of Joe Biden, reintroduce that opponent to the American people before that opponent gets a chance to introduce himself,” said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. “Their whole campaign is going to be about disqualifying Joe Biden.”
Though the ad is among the first to come from the Trump campaign directly since Biden became the presumptive nominee, an undeclared ad war has been raging for months, initially begun during the impeachment of Trump. In previous ads, including two that CNN refused to air citing “demonstrably false claims,” Trump has already attacked the Bidens on similar grounds.
And since late February, Priorities USA, one of the largest Democratic super PACs, has spent $6.5 million on ads attacking Trump in key swing states; an early round featured former supporters of Trump voicing their displeasure with his administration. Priorities USA has since started airing ads starkly criticizing the president’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.
In total, Democratic groups have already spent $15.5 million on general election ads this cycle, according to Advertising Analytics, an ad tracking firm. Many millions more have been spent online as well; Priorities USA alone has spent $19 million on digital attack ads already, and Acronym, another Democratic outside group, has spent $10 million.
But it is unclear how much any of this advertising will matter given Americans’ preoccupation with more pressing concerns. Biden, who lacks the financial wherewithal that Trump and the Republican National Committee have amassed, could stand to benefit in this regard.
“The shorter the race, the more it favors the person with the least amount of money,” said Stevens, who saw firsthand in 2012 how Obama’s financial advantage and the advertising it bought made it difficult for Romney to define himself.
“One of the major advantages of an incumbent president is monetary,” Stevens added. “And that’s being mitigated by this virus.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2020 The New York Times Company
POLITICS OF RACISM AND XENOPHOBIA IN THE TRUMP ERA
Gary Locke Is Mad About That Trump Ad
The president’s latest attack ad makes a reckless claim about the former governor of Washington.
EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE THE ATLANTIC APRIL 10, 2020
NG HAN GUAN / REUTERS
It was getting late in the afternoon, but Gary Locke hadn’t had time for breakfast or lunch. Too many emails, phone calls, and texts had been coming in from friends, family, former aides. The former Washington governor’s friends were indignant. They wanted to know if he had seen President Donald Trump’s campaign ad featuring him. He had. His reaction? “It’s more anger,” he said. He paused. He’s a pretty mild guy, generally. “It’s anger.”
Locke endorsed Joe Biden for president last summer, but he hadn’t expected to be featured in an attack ad. The Trump campaign probably never expected to feature him either. But there he is, in a brief clip included in a montage of the former vice president meeting with various Chinese officials. Locke is standing between two Chinese flags (and next to an American one). Biden is walking toward him, with his head bowed in a way that makes him look deferential.
It’s a standard theatrical move that Biden often does when he sees old political allies. And Locke is an old Biden ally. But he isn’t Chinese. He’s Chinese American. And though the photo was taken at an event in Beijing, it was taken while Locke was serving in the same administration as Biden—as the American ambassador to China. Before that, he was the first Asian American governor of a state not called Hawaii. A section of the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in Seattle is devoted to him.
In other words: Locke is not a Chinese official, as the Trump campaign made him out to be, apparently because of the way he looks and because he was standing next to a Chinese flag.
“It is racial stereotyping at its worst. Asian Americans—whether you’re second-, third-, or fourth-generation, will always be viewed as foreigners,” Locke told me today. “We don’t say that about second- or third-generation Irish Americans or Polish Americans. No one would even think to include them in a picture when you’re talking about foreign government officials.”
Locke is justifiably bewildered by being thrown into the middle of the campaign. “For a lot of Asian Americans, it’s not surprising, but it is disheartening,” he said.
One of Locke’s friends has already died of COVID-19. His first campaign treasurer is in the hospital. And now he’s suddenly been pulled into the presidential campaign by an inadvertent cameo—which he said fits into a long history of racism against Asians in America, stretching from the Chinese Exclusion Act, to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, to the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes as the president and his allies repeatedly refer to the pandemic as the “Chinese virus.”
In a statement he scrambled to put out this afternoon, Locke said Trump was “fanning hatred.” He said with hate crimes and discrimination on the rise across the country, “the Trump team is making it worse. Asian Americans are Americans. Period.”
It was getting late in the afternoon, but Gary Locke hadn’t had time for breakfast or lunch. Too many emails, phone calls, and texts had been coming in from friends, family, former aides. The former Washington governor’s friends were indignant. They wanted to know if he had seen President Donald Trump’s campaign ad featuring him. He had. His reaction? “It’s more anger,” he said. He paused. He’s a pretty mild guy, generally. “It’s anger.”
Locke endorsed Joe Biden for president last summer, but he hadn’t expected to be featured in an attack ad. The Trump campaign probably never expected to feature him either. But there he is, in a brief clip included in a montage of the former vice president meeting with various Chinese officials. Locke is standing between two Chinese flags (and next to an American one). Biden is walking toward him, with his head bowed in a way that makes him look deferential.
It’s a standard theatrical move that Biden often does when he sees old political allies. And Locke is an old Biden ally. But he isn’t Chinese. He’s Chinese American. And though the photo was taken at an event in Beijing, it was taken while Locke was serving in the same administration as Biden—as the American ambassador to China. Before that, he was the first Asian American governor of a state not called Hawaii. A section of the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in Seattle is devoted to him.
In other words: Locke is not a Chinese official, as the Trump campaign made him out to be, apparently because of the way he looks and because he was standing next to a Chinese flag.
“It is racial stereotyping at its worst. Asian Americans—whether you’re second-, third-, or fourth-generation, will always be viewed as foreigners,” Locke told me today. “We don’t say that about second- or third-generation Irish Americans or Polish Americans. No one would even think to include them in a picture when you’re talking about foreign government officials.”
Locke is justifiably bewildered by being thrown into the middle of the campaign. “For a lot of Asian Americans, it’s not surprising, but it is disheartening,” he said.
Locke’s father was part of the Normandy invasion, then was ordered along with the rest of the Fifth Armored Division to the Battle of the Bulge. When Locke watched Band of Brothers, he says, he recognized his father’s story in it. He grew up in a housing project in Seattle, and went on to a long political career that took him through the state legislature, county government, two terms as governor, three years as Barack Obama’s commerce secretary and then two years as Obama’s ambassador to China, from 2011 to 2013. These days, he’s back home, watching the coronavirus crisis unfold in his own state and using his down time in self-isolation to build a second-story deck on his house and finish up some gardening projects. His grown kids are worried he’s going to fall and break his back, like he did 20 years ago, when he was in the middle of budget negotiations with the legislature in Olympia.
One of Locke’s friends has already died of COVID-19. His first campaign treasurer is in the hospital. And now he’s suddenly been pulled into the presidential campaign by an inadvertent cameo—which he said fits into a long history of racism against Asians in America, stretching from the Chinese Exclusion Act, to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, to the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes as the president and his allies repeatedly refer to the pandemic as the “Chinese virus.”
In a statement he scrambled to put out this afternoon, Locke said Trump was “fanning hatred.” He said with hate crimes and discrimination on the rise across the country, “the Trump team is making it worse. Asian Americans are Americans. Period.”
In what seems like both an obvious continuation of past behavior and a sign of what’s to come, the Trump campaign responded by insisting that including Locke was intentional, serving a political purpose that would have been recognizable only to the president’s super fans: that it was actually a subliminal nod to the conspiracy theory that Biden helped his son secure a business deal by bringing him on an official trip. (Hunter Biden did fly to China on Air Force Two and has said he did have a few business meetings while there, but aside from a brief handshake that the vice president shared with one of his son’s business partners, no connection between Hunter’s business dealings and his father’s position has ever been shown.) “The shot with the flags specifically places Biden in Beijing in 2013. It’s for a reason. That’s the Hunter Biden trip. Memory Lane for ol’ Joe,” the Trump campaign’s communications director, Tim Murtaugh, tweeted. Later, the Republican National Committee’s rapid-response director defensively tweeted a screenshot of the clip that included only Biden and the Chinese flag, not Locke or the American flag that was onstage too.Chris Lu, who became friends with Locke when they served together under Obama (Lu was the secretary of the Cabinet and, later, the deputy labor secretary), told me that his assessment of that defense was simple: “It’s bullshit.”
“It’s sort of comical that they think all Chinese people look alike, but more broadly, it’s part of an attack on Asian Americans as others,” Lu said. And it’s part of a pattern, Lu argued. Trump has attacked a Mexican American judge as “Mexican” and concluded that the judge was therefore biased against him, and he has suggested that Colonel Alexander Vindman, the Ukrainian-born former White House national-security official who testified as part of the impeachment hearings, held dual loyalties.
Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate, whose parents immigrated to America from Taiwan, said on Twitter: “Goddamn this shit is infuriating. Gary Locke is as American as the day is long. Trump rewriting history as if he effectively responded to the virus is utter garbage. We lost 70 days and thousands of lives due to his incompetence and disregard for what was happening overseas.”
The ad as a whole makes a confusing argument: that Biden is soft on China because of his own good relationships with Chinese President Xi Jinping and others, and that this makes him somehow culpable for decisions related to the pandemic. Trump has made overtures to Xi himself, including inviting the leader to Mar-a-Lago and having Ivanka Trump’s daughter perform a song for him in Mandarin; tweeting that they’ll “always be friends”; and taking his word on supposed efforts to contain the coronavirus—all mixed in with his trade-war rattling and posturing on currency manipulation. (The Locke appearance also isn’t the only factual problem with this ad.)
When I asked Murtaugh to explain the ad, he sent me a statement that was a slightly longer version of what he’d tweeted last night. He provided no answers to specific questions, no explanation, and no response to Locke’s concerns about stoking division, xenophobia, and potentially more hate crimes. There was certainly no apology.
“I don’t expect an apology from them,” Locke told me. “It is so characteristic of their view toward people of color.”
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