Daniel DePetris

Coronavirus is forcing Biden to borrow from Trump’s campaign playbook

What does a leading U.S. presidential candidate do when a deadly and highly contagious virus is spreading throughout the mainland United States and hogging all of the news coverage? Well, build an in-home studio in your basement, of course.

Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is confronting a conundrum most candidates who run for high office don’t have to deal with. In normal times, candidates lose media coverage when they tumble in the polls, run out of money, or fail to excite voters (and reporters) on the stump. That’s an unfortunate part of the business, but it’s something candidates and their advisers anticipate and even control. If a candidate has money to slosh around, he can air more commercials to keep his face in the minds of voters. If a candidate is short of cash, he can still change the media dynamic by attacking the rest of the field or putting up a mesmerising debate performance.

Unfortunately for Biden, we aren’t living in normal times. The coronavirus is sucking up all of the media’s oxygen, with entire prime-time shows devoted exclusively to the pandemic on a continuous loop over a span of 24 hours. There is literally nothing else America is talking about at the moment.

The problem is even worse for Biden because he is preparing to face-off against an opponent in Donald Trump who is a master at getting everybody in the world to pay attention to what he says at any given second. Trump is incredibly talented at gobbling up what journalists call ‘free media’, a phenomenon where major television networks block out coverage and carry a candidate’s press conferences, speeches, and rallies live on-air. Trump vanquished the 2016 GOP presidential field partly by using the media to his advantage, crowing about his supposed accomplishments and intellect, sautéing Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio with all kinds of creative nicknames, and deliberately picking fights with journalists.

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Written by
Daniel DePetris

Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune and a foreign affairs writer for Newsweek.

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