President Trump’s reelection campaign is preparing its first major wave of television ads for the general election as it works to blunt a slide in Trump’s approval ratings a little over six months before voters cast their ballots.
A Trump campaign official confirmed to The Hill that the campaign is dropping seven figures on a national ad spree “praising the President’s management of the coronavirus crisis.” The clips will air for a week starting on Sunday.
The campaign is expected to follow its blitz with a round of ads criticizing former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, according to Politico, which first reported on the Trump campaign’s advertising efforts.
The new ads mark a reversal for the Trump campaign, which had resisted going on the airwaves in part to avoid the perception that it was seeking to politicize the coronavirus crisis. However, GOP officials appeared alarmed in recent days over early warning signs about Trump’s reelection prospects.
After the president enjoyed an initial polling bounce, recent surveys have shown a noticeable drop both in Trump’s overall approval rating and voters’ approval of his handling of the pandemic, which has infected more than a million people in the country.
Trump was also reportedly presented with internal polling showing that he trails Biden in several key states, which some officials told reporters led to the president lashing out at his campaign chief.
Nevertheless, Trump and White House officials have become increasingly bullish about his administration’s response to the coronavirus and the ensuing recovery, which have become the cornerstone of the 2020 race.
Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner said on Fox News on Wednesday that “a lot of the country should be back to normal” by June and “really rocking again” by July, adding that the federal response was a “great success story.”
However, Democrats have launched a cavalcade of criticism against Trump’s efforts to combat the virus, saying he failed to heed early warnings of the disease’s seriousness. The White House’s response is currently the focus of a multimillion-dollar Democratic ad blitz casting Trump as ineffective.
“Donald Trump said he would put America first. And now, he has — the United States leads the world in coronavirus cases. More than 50,000 Americans dead, twice as many deaths as any other country. Over 26 million people have lost their jobs, and it’s only getting worse,” a narrator says in an ad sponsored by the liberal super PAC Priorities USA.
The Trump campaign has a hefty bank account to tap into to try to beat back the criticism, having nearly $100 million in the bank at the end of March, roughly quadrupling Biden’s cash on hand.