President Trump’s reelection campaign launched a series of Facebook ads Thursday questioning Joe Biden’s age and fitness for office, expanding on a personal attack line that Republicans have only floated thus far.
The ads asked if the former vice president, 77, is “too old” to be elected president and saying, “geriatric mental health is no laughing matter.”
While Republicans have grumbled about Biden’s age and highlighted verbal gaffes and technical difficulties during his events, the Trump campaign’s ads mark the first time it has used ads to explicitly target his overall fitness.
Trump, who is known to lash out at his opponents in personal terms, has alleged that Biden lacks the mental fitness to lead the country.
“He’s not going to be running it,” Trump told supporters at a March rally in North Carolina. “Other people are going to. They’re going to put him into a home, and other people are going to be running the country and they’re going to be super-left, radical crazies.”
At times, Biden, who has a stutter, stumbles over words and occasionally misspeaks.
But so does Trump.
Analysts have questioned the wisdom of attacking Biden in this way given that Trump is about to turn 74, often appears to lose his train of thought halfway through a sentence, and frequently stumbles over words.
Biden’s lead over Trump in polls with voters over 65 continues to grow, a decisive voting block in elections especially in states like Florida.
The Trump and Biden campaigns have already begun blitzing each other with negative ads, with many of the attacks focusing on their responses to the coronavirus or stances toward China.
“Donald Trump doesn’t understand. We have an economic crisis because we have a public health crisis. And we have a public health crisis because he refused to act,” a narrator says in the nearly three-minute long clip released this week by the Biden campaign. “Donald Trump didn’t build a great economy. His failure to lead destroyed one.”
The attacks on Biden’s fitness for office come as polls show Trump trailing the former vice president in a number of key battleground states, raising alarms from Republicans over the president’s chances in November.
A new GOP-leaning poll by Rassmussen out today shows nearly a quarter of Republicans wish Trump was not their nominee this year.