The coronavirus is clearly the issue that walloped Trump and made this a tight election. Remarkably, Joe Biden is still completely unable to articulate anything significant he would have done differently, or would do differently going forward.
That's not necessarily going to nullify the issue as a problem for Trump, although it might blunt the impact. Criticizing the other side only gets you so far, if you can't finish the thought by saying "... and here's what I would have done differently if I was in charge."
But the coronavirus is such a huge issue, with so many secondary crises spawning from it, that Trump would inevitably suffer just because he was in charge when it happened. The "Trump lied, people died" onslaught did real damage to him.
The coronavirus might just make this election a binary pass/fail referendum on the incumbent, which is why Biden's hilariously poor quality as a candidate doesn't seem to be hurting him much at the polls. Trump's focus should be on giving positive reasons to re-elect him.
Unless Biden completely falls apart at the debates, there isn't a whole lot Trump can do to make him look worse. Playing pure defense and spending the rest of the campaign slapping back at allegations would be a mistake too.
Pointing out that Biden is all talk on the coronavirus will be useful. After that, Trump's focus should be on his clear superiority as the choice to lead America through post-pandemic reconstruction. Put some things on the table people can get excited about.
Trump might be tempted to play defense by emphasizing how great things were going before the pandemic. That should be part of an *offensive*, forward-looking strategy: you want me in office to deliver that success again, and here's how I'll get it done.
This is a time for bold proposals, game-changers the Democrats can't keep up with - and Trump should remind voters they need to take the Dem House majority away if they want to see those bold proposals enacted. Boldly go where no Democrat can follow.
This will also energize Republicans because it will remind them Trump does more than just talk about conservative reforms that would be awfully nice in theory but can never be implemented. It's one of his strongest selling points.
Trump needs to reframe the election as forward-looking, a debate about what comes next, instead of spending all his energy on trying to win a pass/fail referendum in which the Democrat candidate can remain safely invisible. And make the election about DOING, not just talking.
Almost all of Trump's negatives in this election, including on the virus, flow from things he SAID, not what he's actually done. His strong suit is getting things done, while Biden's hollow half-century career in politics is a devastating indictment of his inability to do so.
Trump can loop his foreign policy triumphs into that discussion - clear examples of him overpowering the permanent bureaucracy and winning, achieving things they all agreed were impossible, while they used every dirty trick they could think up to thwart him.
And Trump has a really good angle on how, contrary to all the caterwauling about Orange Hitler, he's been a restrained and respectful executive while totalitarian Democrats routinely abuse power in every way they can dream up, right up to leaking his confidential tax info.
We need a flourishing of liberty and free-market capitalism to recover from the coronavirus and defeat the new fascist menace, China. Joe Biden and his ugly, hateful, greedy, power-crazed party are the worst possible choice to deliver that, but Donald Trump has proven he can.
Trump likes to play aggressive, and that's the ground he should fight from. This is about the future, about unlocking the energy and innovation of an American people that Trump loves, and Democrats hate with every fiber of their elitist beings.
That, by the way, is why Dems and their media keep frantically trying to manufacture anonymously-source stories about Trump bad-mouthing the groups that support him in private. They need to blunt his clear edge on liking America and her people far more than Democrats do.
Trump can shift the election to forward-looking ground where he can win big. If he doesn't, needling Biden will not get him very far in a race that is purely about Trump vs. Not-Trump. At this point, a good number of voters don't even care that Biden is just a placeholder. /end
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