President Trump’s re-election campaign says that the left-wing of the Democratic Party is exposing Joseph R. Biden’s “fake tough-on-China routine.”
“Beijing Biden can pretend to be tough on China, but there is more than four decades worth of material (plus some from the past year) that will make it impossible for him to deceive Americans,” the campaign said in an email blast Friday.
Mr. Trump has faced a barrage of criticism over the way he has responded to the coronavirus and been accused of trying to shed some of the blame by making a scapegoat out of China.
It also has sparked a back-and-forth between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden over who has been weaker on China.
The Biden campaign recently started airing an ad saying Mr. Trump is resorting to negative attacks against the presumed Democratic presidential nominee because he wants to distract from the fact that he left the nation unprepared and unprotected from the coronavirus.
They ad featured footage of Mr. Biden saying he would have insisted that American health experts were on the ground in China early on after the outbreak.
“But Trump rolled over for the Chinese, he took their word for it,” the narrator says in the Biden ad.
But the Trump campaign and the GOP says Mr. Biden is attempting to rewrite his “soft” record on China.
“Joe Biden spent more than four decades in Washington standing up for the Chinese instead of American workers,” the Trump campaign said Friday. “To cover up his terrible record, his campaign is churning out videos negative towards China that ’rely heavily on images of people of Asian descent,’ as The New York Times would put it if Biden were a Republican.”
They said Mr. Biden’s “left-wing base is going nuts” and “won’t let him even pretend to be tough on China.”
Mr. Biden has downplayed the threat over his career, including last year when he ridiculed the idea that China was about to replace the United States as a world superpower, they said.
“China is going to eat our lunch? Come on man,” Mr. Biden said at a campaign stop in Iowa.
“They can’t even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the West,” he said.”They can’t figure out how they’re going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. They’re not bad folks, folks … They’re not competition for us.”
Mr. Trump said at the time that Mr. Biden is being “naive about China.”
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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