Boy, the coronavirus pandemic is really causing the Trump campaign a lot of problems. It can't brag about the economy, Trump has to appear all serious and stuff, and the plan to unleash an avalanche of attacks on Joe Biden has to be postponed.

The plan was to take advantage of the moment when Biden would be working to unite the Democratic Party while raising enough money to compete in the general election, and hit him with a barrage of attack ads to define him in the minds of voters before Biden could define himself. That’s the basic strategy the Obama campaign used against Mitt Romney in 2012, but we’re talking about the Trump campaign here, so the 2020 version was going to be wildly dishonest at every turn. After all, this is the campaign of the man who already tried to take Biden down by extorting a foreign nation.

The Trump campaign and its officials are taking regular shots at Biden on Twitter, so it’s not like they’re giving up on negative campaigning. But so far even they recognize it would be a bad look to pour millions of dollars into attack ads while Trump is trying to appear very serious and focused on the pandemic. Even if Trump himself can’t resist sniping at Biden during coronavirus updates.

Of course, the Trump campaign continues to raise money and stockpile it for a wave of ugliness the moment its leaders decide it’s time, whether that’s because the threat of coronavirus has subsided or because it’s the final weeks before the election and they stop caring about propriety or appearances. One of these days, all the lies they’re preparing will come out.

Posted with permission from Daily Kos.