Donald Trump in recent weeks has been hammered by advertisements taking him to task for his disastrous handling of the coronavirus crisis. The ads have been effective, largely because they’ve been true: Trump did, as a Joe Biden ad last month illustrated, fail to take the COVID threat seriously. He has, as a new spot from liberal Super PAC Win the West highlighted Thursday, repeatedly spread false information and lies about both the virus and his administration’s response to it. Trump has appeared on television every day in rambling, self-aggrandizing, and highly misleading press conferences, ostensibly to discuss his administration’s efforts to combat the deadly virus—and every day, he provides new soundbites for his opponents to use against him.

Concerned that could hurt his reelection chances in November, the Republican National Committee is springing into action to provide some counter-messaging, pouring more than a million dollars into the president’s effort to rewrite his coronavirus response. According to Politico, the GOP is launching a massive ad offensive in battleground states, praising Trump’s leadership in the crisis. The ads are aimed at convincing swing voters of Trump’s emergency management, in part by using clips of Democratic governors Gavin Newsom of California and Andrew Cuomo of New York speaking positively of parts of the administration’s efforts. It’s an unusually large ad campaign this early in a race, as Politico noted, but reflects the extent to which Republicans fear his coronavirus response has threatened him politically.

“[Trump] sometimes drowns out his own message,” Lindsey Graham, one of the president’s closest allies on Capitol Hill, told the New York Times of the daily coronavirus press briefings. “I told him your opponent is no longer Joe Biden—it’s this virus.”

Trump and the administration maintain that he has done a great job and that his messaging has been fine. On Thursday, he again touted the “through the roof” ratings for his daily pressers in response to criticism from the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board. And Trump returned to the subject of his TV ratings on Friday.

Trump ideological allies might be right to worry. Though Trump initially saw an undeserved bump in approval as the crisis escalated, that support appears to have leveled off, and recent polls suggest more Americans have come to regard his handling of the crisis as poor—an ominous trend for the president in an election that is coming to be defined by the pandemic. “It will not merely be the case of ‘Did he see us through this?’” Peter Feaver, a special adviser for strategic planning on the National Security Council under George W. Bush, told CNN this week of November’s referendum on Trump’s coronavirus response. “What will also matter is: ‘Did he get us into this, through stumbles, acts of omission and commission?’”

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