WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) - US President Donald Trump's re-election campaign on Monday (Oct 19) announced a US$55 million (S$74.6 million) advertising blitz for the final two weeks of the race in a string of battleground states, as the president spent the day unleashing attacks against Joe Biden, Dr Anthony Fauci and the news media.
Trump also dismissed concerns about the continuing coronavirus pandemic, saying people were "tired of Covid" and news coverage about it. But his barrage intensified Monday on a wide range of topics, as all public polls show him running behind Biden, the Democratic nominee.
The competing activities by the president and his team were a microcosm of the campaign that Trump has waged this year. Once more, his slash-and-burn commentary swamped most news coverage, even as his advisers used conventional levers to try to pull him across the finish line on Election Day.
On a morning conference call with campaign staff members that several reporters listened in on, Trump unleashed a torrent of anger about Biden and the business practices of his son Hunter Biden, as well as about Fauci, who is overwhelmingly popular with voters. The president called Fauci "a disaster"; the Trump campaign recently featured Fauci in an ad by taking his words out of context.
Trump denounced a New York Times article describing the state of his campaign; claimed to adore his White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, of whom he has been deeply critical in recent weeks; and insisted he felt better now about winning the election than he had at any point in this campaign or his last one.
"I wouldn't have told you that maybe two or three weeks ago," added Trump, who announced Oct 2 that he had tested positive for the coronavirus and spent three nights at Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre.
At a campaign rally Monday in Arizona, where polls show that the president is trailing Biden, Trump attacked Biden as a "criminal" and then attacked a reporter as a "criminal" for not reporting on an unsubstantiated article by The New York Post about Biden's son. He also faulted the news media for what he called excessive coverage of the coronavirus.
"They're getting tired of the pandemic, aren't they?" Trump said in Prescott, in central Arizona. "You turn on CNN. That's all they cover. Covid, Covid, pandemic, Covid, Covid." He added, "They're trying to talk people out of voting."
Arizona has had over 231,000 coronavirus cases, the eighth-highest total in the nation, and more than 5,800 deaths, the 11th-highest number, according to a New York Times database.
Early in the summer, the state led the nation in new infections per capita. It hit a peak of 4,797 new cases one day in late June, but new infections declined after Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican, reversed himself and allowed local governments to require residents to wear masks.
While Trump is trying to re-create certain conditions of the 2016 campaign, he has not achieved his own level of relative discipline in the final two weeks that year. Back then, he tempered some of his incendiary comments and tweets.
His performance so far this week does not suggest that is in the offing.
In Arizona, he bounced from joking about the perils for a president of engaging with corporate officials while seeking donations to airing a litany of grievances against people including former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, the Bidens, Fauci again, and two female NBC News hosts, one of whom recently interviewed him and the other of whom is set to moderate the final debate.
He also praised himself for straying from the prepared speech on his teleprompter.
Earlier, the president's campaign manager, Bill Stepien, announced the advertising spending on a call with reporters. The US$55 million spending plan comes as some senior campaign advisers have described a cash crunch affecting the kinds of hard-dollar donations that pay for advertising.
The ads will be funded by the campaign and the Republican National Committee, and will focus mostly on the Sun Belt and the Rust Belt, including Arizona, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin.
The Trump campaign has been out-advertised on the television airwaves for weeks, but Stepien praised the ground operation built by the RNC as a countervailing force.
And he said that Biden's late push on the ground to pull voters to the polls and to sway undecided voters was simply "too late," and that early voting numbers were not as favourable to Democrats as they seemed to be.
The new ads are focused in particular on reaching older voters, who polls have shown are moving toward Biden, the former vice-president. Ronna McDaniel, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, said one ad would focus on "Medicare savings" achieved during Trump's tenure, which she called "truly phenomenal."
Trump advisers said one goal was to drive up Biden's disapproval numbers, which are lower than Hillary Clinton's were four years ago.
"This is really a tale of two campaigns," Stepien said. "Joe Biden is putting it all on TV." "We like our plan better," he said.
Stepien echoed Trump, saying that the campaign felt "better about our pathway to victory right now than we have at any point in the campaign this year." He added, "And this optimism is based on numbers and data - not feel, not sense."
Trump advisers hope that the president can use the second and final debate against Biden, scheduled for Thursday, to change the trajectory of the campaign.
Officials have said they're not planning the kind of structured preparation sessions that they held with Trump before the first debate, an encounter that left aides cringing as the president repeatedly interrupted Biden.
The debate commission announced Monday evening that for this week's debate, it would mute each candidate's microphone while the other delivers his opening two-minute answer to questions.
After he landed in Phoenix, Trump was asked if he was "running scared." "I'm not running scared," he said. "I think I'm running angry. I'm running happy and I'm running content because we've done a great job."
