Trump advisers kicking themselves for last minute focus on failed Hunter Biden laptop smear: report

According to a report from the Daily Beast, aides close to Donald Trump are regretting letting the president make the debunked story about Hunter Biden's laptop emails become the main focus of the president's campaign in the waning days -- saying the story flopped if new polling is to be believed.

The laptop story which was pushed by the Trump-friendly New York Post after multiple outlets -- including Fox News-- passed on it dominated headlines for a week as the president tried to use it as a cudgel against Democratic challenger Joe Biden.

However, the story only appealed to the president's rabid base and didn't do anything to bring new voters into the fold, which has led to the president's campaign to move on as if it never happened.

According to the Beast, now that the story has fizzled "some Trump advisers are regretting the decision to try to put Hunter Biden and his emails front and center."

The report goes on to note that, "Though the president has repeatedly mentioned the allegations in rallies, on Twitter, and at a presidential debate last week, his campaign has barely supplemented it with its paid media," only mentioning it in two of the 29 television ads the campaign has run since the Post story broke.

Worse than the voting public ignoring the sketchy allegations is the fact that members of the President's own staff have become increasingly disenchanted and bored with attacks on Biden's son in the last days of the 2020 campaign.

"Among senior aides to the president, some Hunter-fatigue has already started to seep in. One official working on the Trump reelection effort privately expressed to The Daily Beast this week that they saw little point in harping on the Hunter Biden emails and foreign-dealings stories, as it had little chance of significantly altering the narrative, even at the margins<," the report states with one Trump aide lamenting, "I don’t know what’s going to happen in this election, you don’t know what’s going to happen, nobody knows. But I will bet a lot of money that Hunter Biden is not going to win Pennsylvania for [Trump].”

That can be borne out with the Beast reporting that Trump fans on 4Chan -- who are not hesitant to push outlandish conspiracy rumors -- "are starting to get fed up. The forum’s pro-Trump denizens had embraced the hype around a Biden story that was set to be published Monday morning on The Gateway Pundit. But when the story failed to deliver a bombshell about Hunter Biden, 4Chan posters began to gripe that the Hunter Biden “scandal” had failed to meaningfully affect the election."

While noting that the Post story failed to implicate the older Biden, the Beast reports, "the Trump campaign signaled on Monday that themes like the economy and Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation—issues that would likely be emphasized by any presidential campaign—will be far more central to its messaging in the days before voters go to the polls than anything to do with Biden’s family members."

You can read more here.