Trump campaign sweats as playbook that worked against Hillary flops against Biden: report

President Donald Trump's campaign has for months tried to deploy the same playbook they used against Hillary Clinton in 2016 against presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

However, as The Daily Beast reports, a campaign of nonstop attacks and smears hasn't put a single dent in the polling lead that Biden has maintained for months.

"It would be nice, for sure, if we were running against a replica of Hillary," a senior Trump administration official tells the publication. "But only Hillary Clinton is Hillary Clinton."

Two sources tell The Daily Beast that even Trump has joked about hoping to see Biden drop out so that Clinton can swoop in at the convention so he can "beat her harder than he did last time around."

One Republican source tells the publication that Biden has an advantage because, unlike Clinton, he hasn't been the object of decades' worth of right-wing media propaganda.

"While Biden has universal name-ID, unlike Hillary Clinton he hasn’t spent the last two decades as the principal boogeyman among conservatives, and beyond that, he’s generally been pretty undefined politically, other than the fact that he was Barack Obama’s VP,” the Republican explained.