President Trump’s reelection campaign released a new ad Thursday attacking former Vice President Joe Biden over his stance on China.
The minute-long clip seeks to paint Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, as too friendly toward China, airing clips of him saying as vice president, “They’re not bad folks, folks” and “The growth of China is overwhelmingly in our interest.”
The ad also features an unsubstantiated theory that Biden’s son was able to ink a business deal in China due to his father’s influence as vice president.
The Trump campaign and its allies have waged a campaign to try to cast Biden as soft on China as the administration’s response to the coronavirus, which originated in China, comes under scrutiny.
America First Action PAC, the largest outside group supporting Trump’s reelection, launched a $10 million ad buy in the crucial swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to air a series of ads as part of its “Beijing Biden” campaign.
Biden’s campaign has fired back at the ads, releasing clips showing Trump downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic in the early months of 2020 as it began spreading across the country and praising China’s response.
Trump’s ads have also been slammed as misleading by several fact checkers.
“Joe Biden sounded the alarm about the coronavirus outbreak early, calling on Trump to lead and mobilize against it – while publicly warning him not to trust the Chinese government’s word about containment. But Trump didn’t listen. Instead, he echoed Chinese Communist Party propaganda and horrifically mismanaged the worst public health crisis in over 100 years,” Biden spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement to The Hill.