Former Vice President Joe Biden has been on the campaign trail for only a few days and already he’s made the kind of gaffe that could cost him Pennsylvania.

During a Wednesday campaign rally in Iowa City, Iowa, Biden attempted to convince voters that China is no threat to American jobs and prosperity, a blatantly absurd and ignorant point of view. Talk about anti-science.

But that is exactly what he said:

China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man. They can’t even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the east, I mean in the west, They can’t figure out how they are going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not competition for us.

“I hear these stories about how China is going to eat our lunch. Give me a break!” he added for good measure.

This is exactly the kind of talk that handed the Rustbelt to President Trump in 2016, that got him over the finish line in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan; that crumbled the Democrat Party’s Big Blue Wall.

What’s more, this is exactly the kind of talk that won Trump the Republican nomination against 16 seasoned, albeit hapless, Republican politicians.

Trump earned the working class vote, took it away from the Democrats, by finally acknowledging what “free trade” has done to gut America’s working class, to annihilate the Rustbelt, to shatter our manufacturing base.

Like a lot of Republicans, I bought into those “free trade” arguments … until the utter devastation this way of thinking became too awful to ignore.

China Joe can puff out his chest with empty rhetoric about how our guys are better than their guys, and while he’s right about that, he is also deliberately ignoring how the deck has been stacked against our guys, how the game is rigged at the expense of the American worker.

For decades we’ve been the free trade suckers not charging tariffs while other countries, most especially China, a murdered us with theirs.

How is that “free trade?”

It’s not, but it does benefit the American establishment and the wealthy while the American men and women who make things lose everything.

Sure, the stuff from China is coming in cheap, but when your jobs plan is to tell an unemployed factory worker to “learn to code,” it had better be cheap.

How stupid is China Joe to dismiss, wrist-flick, and take us back to a time before we had learned our lesson?

But that has always been the problem with China Joe: on top of being corrupt, he’s a dimwit, a gaffe machine, a lounge singer without the self-awareness to see everyone’s laughing at his swagger.

And the corruption is real and might help to explain why Biden is dog-whistling to China that they have nothing to worry about from a Biden administration.

Breitbart’s own Peter Schweizer has already uncovered a number of legitimate questions about the Biden family’s disturbing ties to China.

On Sunday, the Fox News Channel’s Steve Hilton laid it all out perfectly:

In December 2013, then-Vice President Biden rode Air Force Two on an official trip to Asia, as tensions were high over disputed territories in the East China Sea. Biden was joined by his son, Hunter, who was building a private equity firm along with his business partner and friend, Chris Heinz – heir of the Heinz Ketchup family fortune and stepson of then-Secretary of State John Kerry. … Joe Biden struck a soft, friendly tone with the Chinese leadership, disappointing allies in the area, like Japan, who were alarmed by China’s increasing aggression. But perhaps Joe had other issues besides the global balance of power on his mind, issues like his son’s business deals. Hunter’s presence on the trip was far from coincidence. Just 10 days later, his company, Rosemont Seneca, signed an exclusive $1 billion deal with the state-owned Bank of China, creating an investment fund called Bohai Harvest, with money backed by the Chinese government. In the words of Peter Schweizer, who first unveiled these conflicts of interest in his book “Secret Empires,” “the Chinese government was literally funding a business that it co-owned along with the sons of two of America’s most powerful decision makers.” That is what it looks like to be “compromised by a foreign power.”

But let’s say there’s no there there. As difficult as that might be to believe looking at the evidence, let’s give Biden the benefit of the doubt. It doesn’t matter. Biden’s gaffe, his gobsmacking decision to dismiss China’s ability to gut America’s working class, is such a big deal it’s almost as if Trump wrote it himself.

Sorry Democrats, Donald Trump cannot be psyched out like the neurotic John McCain. Sorry corrupt media, Donald Trump will not turn into a pile of cowardly mush like Mitt Romney.

Trump is Trump and what Biden did here was hand the president a Flintstone-sized club to beat him up all over the Midwest with. Biden basically directed, produced, wrote, and starred in Trump’s Pennsylvania/Wisconsin/Michigan campaign ads.

Above all that, it’s just a fact that Joe Biden is a terrible presidential candidate, one of the worst ever, and now that he’s nearing 80-years-old, age is catching up to him.

If the economy holds, and it looks like it will, now that the media’s Russia Collusion Hoax has been debunked, Trump, like any incumbent president who can legitimately run on peace and prosperity, is going to be tough to beat in 2020.

But if the Democrats want a chance at taking back the White House, Joe Biden, a frail, corrupt, dunderhead who represents yesterday, is a terrible choice.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.