Trump team ramps up smear campaign on Obama’s ebola czar for exposing the president’s COVID-19 bumbling: report

Stung by a highly effective video he made for Vice President Joe Biden criticizing Donald Trump’s response to the growing COVID-19 pandemic, the communications team working on the president’s re-election is going after President Barack Obama’s former ebola czar, Ron Klain.

Klain, who is now becoming a fixture on cable news, took part in a video ad touting the campaign of Biden, and used his expertise to rip into the Trump administration’s efforts to deal with the national health crisis. That put a target on his back as the president’s 2020 campaign team is trying to stem the damage that threatens the president’s chances of being re-elected in November.

“Over the past week, the president’s allies have trained its fire on him, seeking to undermine his credibility and use Klain’s high-profile role as the face of Biden’s coronavirus response to bolster their own arguments about Biden’s own competence,” Politico‘s Marc Caputo wrote.

According to former Trump campaign advisor Micahel Caputo, “Ron Klain is the puppeteer. To define Gepetto is to define Pinocchio,” while noting that Klain’s prominence as a critic of the president coincided with Biden’s brief silence about the president.

“The attacks on Klain are driven by a sense of urgency. While a new poll shows a majority approves of Trump’s coronavirus response, it also reveals that Americans, by a 20-point margin, believe he initially reacted too slowly to the crisis — a central component of Klain’s public critique,” the Politico report states, before adding, “The Trump campaign responded quickly to Klain’s criticisms, dismissing it as ‘misinformation’ while disputing Klain’s characterization of the pandemic office’s fate. The Republican National Committee and conservative media outlets spotlighted Klain’s statements about Trump’s limitations on China travel (he called them too ineffective but said limitations were ultimately good) and his past use of the term ‘Wuhan Virus,’ a description Klain used before scientists adopted the name coronavirus or COVID-19.”

With Politico noting Klain, ” ….successfully managed the U.S. response to the Ebola virus in 2014, Klain is viewed as Biden’s most articulate and most trusted surrogate for what has suddenly emerged as the most important issue of the campaign: coronavirus response,” the ex-Obama administration official stated he obviously touched a nerve with Trump’s people.

“Perhaps a video with 4.7 million views got their attention,” Klain told the reporter in an email.

Sam Nunberg, a 2016 Trump campaign adviser noted that the president’s people will try to portray Klain into Biden’s Kellyanne Conway, notable for her one-time defense of the president by staking a claim on “alternative facts.”

“Ron Klain will be made into Kellyanne Conway by Republicans,” Nunberg suggested before admitting, “Obviously Joe Biden needs as many lucid and clear advisers as possible and I would credit Klain for being a very aggressive surrogate for Biden.”

You can read more here and view Klain’s video below: