Trump campaign to target Hunter Biden in digital ad blitz
August 19, 2020
President Donald Trump’s campaign is dragging Hunter Biden back into the race — on the day his father formally accepts the Democratic nomination.
The reelection effort is to begin a nearly two-minute digital advertisement early Thursday morning highlighting the younger Biden’s business dealings with China and resurfaces past allegations that Joe Biden’s family profited off his vice presidency.
The spot is part of a high seven-figure digital advertising effort to coincide with the Democratic National Convention. It focuses on a 2013 trip the Bidens took to Beijing and uses footage of Hunter Biden being pressed in a TV interview about whether his negotiations to establish a joint investment fund with a Chinese bank came up on the international flight he took with his father.
Trump has turned Hunter Biden into a focal point of his reelection campaign, casting him as a corrupt figure who financially capitalized off his father’s White House tenure. Trump’s decision to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate Hunter Biden’s work for an energy firm in the country led to the president’s impeachment.
Trump has called for China to investigate the Bidens and last year tweeted that the younger Biden “got 1.5 Billion Dollars from China despite no experience and for no apparent reason.”
Hunter Biden has denied that anything improper took place on the Beijing trip, telling ABC News in a 2019 interview that his dealings with China never came up on the flight and that he went “because my daughter was on the trip, too."
The Trump campaign’s new ad more broadly portrays the former vice president as overly cozy with China, saying that “While China was crippling America, Joe Biden was standing up for” the country.
The Biden campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The digital ad will be running on YouTube, an outlet that is the centerpiece of the Trump campaign’s convention week digital offensive.
Starting Tuesday at midnight, the reelection effort has purchased 96 hours straight of advertising on YouTube, giving it full control of the site’s masthead. As part of the plan, the campaign is also running digital advertising on the homepages of news outlets including the Washington Post, Fox News, and the Daily Caller. It will also appear on streaming services including Hulu.
Trump aides concede Biden is likely to get a bump out of the four-day convention, but say they are trying to blunt whatever momentum he gets through its digital blitz. The president has also spent the week traveling to swing states and on Thursday will make an appearance near Biden’s hometown of Scranton, Pa.
Campaign officials say that more than 30 million people viewed the campaign’s YouTube videos on the first day of advertising, a total that surpassed the number of viewers for the first day of the convention. The campaign has released a handful of ads as part of the effort, including some casting Biden as senile and others highlighting the former vice president’s comments on race.
Source: https://www.politico.com/
