they are trying to link Trump to China

“With the economy in shambles and the pandemic ravaging the country, making the election a referendum on China is perhaps Mr. Trump’s only chance to extend his White House tenure past January 2021,” Mead wrote. This strategy would enable Trump to exploit a coronavirus-related distrust of China, Mead added, and it would create problems for Democrats which would include, but also go beyond, Hunter Biden’s business ties to the Middle Kingdom. Plenty “of other senior Democrats have made money (in China), supported trade policies that gave away too much without holding Beijing accountable, or praised China’s government in ways that would make painful viewing in a campaign ad today,” Mead said.

The column sounded cynical, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. Trump’s campaign has already released an ad highlighting Hunter Biden’s connection to a Chinese bank, and Trump said last weekend that if Joe Biden was elected foreign countries such as China and Mexico would “own” him. On Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo upped the ante, blaming China for the global covid-19 death toll. In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, he said, “China caused an enormous amount of pain, loss of life, and now a huge challenge for the global economy and the American economy, as well, by not sharing the information they had” about the virus. Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and a longtime China hawk, called for a big military buildup in East Asia. “The Chinese Communist Party will try to exploit the world’s weakness in the wake of a virus it unleashed,” Cotton claimed on Thursday. “We cannot allow it to succeed.”

With criticisms of Trump’s handling of the pandemic growing and new opinion polls showing him trailing Biden in several key battleground states, we are sure to see more of these diversions. But adopting a China campaign strategy would also present a number of problems for Trump, beginning with the fact that Hunter Biden’s investment partnership isn’t the only A..