MSNBC's Joe Scarborough explained why Joe Biden had a much easier line of attack against President Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
A new ad from the Democratic National Committee attacks Trump's record in the White House, and the "Morning Joe" host said that exposed the distance between the "tough" guy he campaigned as and the "bad president" he had actually been.
"Let's strip this down to its bare essence, which I tell people when they come to me saying they want to run," Scarborough said. "I say, what's your bumper sticker? The bumper sticker here is, Trump is a bad president. Whereas in 2016, the bumper sticker from Hillary Clinton was Trump is a bad guy. People in 2016 said yeah, he's a bad guy, [but] maybe we need a bad guy. In fact, the 2020 Trump campaign ad is, Trump is a bad guy, maybe we need a bad guy right now."
"But what this Biden ad does is he shows how Trump being a bad president is impacting America," he added. "He's cutting your health care, working-class Americans, he's promising to cut your health care guarantees you had under the Affordable Care Act. He's giving tax cuts not to you, not to the small businesses that employ you, but the billionaires. He's got a failed trade war that cost billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. A hundred thousand Americans are dead because he couldn't manage the pandemic because of his magical thinking. Tens of millions of jobs are lost because he didn't act quickly enough on the pandemic. We now have a recession, and then, of course, Donald Trump saying, 'I bear no responsibility.'
Scarborough said the DNC's new ad had effectively connected Trump's personality to his job performance, and showed how that impacted voters' lives.
"This is what the Hillary Clinton campaign didn't do," he said. "What they couldn't do in 2016 because he was running as a challenger. This is exactly what the Biden campaign is doing right now."