New Biden ad claims Trump ‘froze like a deer in the headlights’ when coronavirus hit

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Voters trust Biden more on COVID-19, Trump more on economy in new Fox News Poll

Peter Doocy reports on the latest campaign poll numbers as Joe Biden forms a team to vet potential running mates.

Joe Biden’s presidential campaign on Friday launched a new digital spot that charges that President Trump was “unprepared” and “indecisive” as the coronavirus pandemic swept the globe.

“When coronavirus came, Trump froze like a deer in the headlights,” the narrator in the ad says.

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The spot claims that as “the warning signs became more ominous, the alarms flashed red, and there was our president unprepared, indecisive, frozen, paralyzed by his fear of offending the Chinese government and losing his precious trade deal, panicked at the thought of what a stock market collapse would mean to his reelection.”

The former vice president's campaign says the ad will start running immediately on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube in the key general election battlegrounds of Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But Biden aides wouldn’t say how much the campaign is spending to run the ads.

The ads are the latest from the Biden campaign and allied super PACs that criticize the president for initially downplaying the severity of the coronavirus outbreak and for fumbling the federal response to the pandemic.

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The president, defending his record, has repeatedly pointed to his ban on non-U.S. citizens from flying from China to the U.S., which was implemented on Feb. 2.

“I stopped people from China very early — very, very early — from coming into our country,” the president said on April 4.

A week later, at a White House briefing on the coronavirus, Trump again praised his administration’s actions, declaring that “everything we did was right” as he slammed media reports that his administration had failed to adequately ramp up testing and production of medical supplies to those on the front lines fighting the outbreak.

Over the past month the Trump reelection campaign and a top pro-Trump super PAC have launched TV ads accusing Biden of being soft on China – where the for decades.