Trump's campaign spent $400,000 on cable news ads in D.C., reportedly to assuage Trump's re-election angst

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last updated 9 June 2020

President Trump trails former Vice President Joe Biden by double digits in a bevy of new national polls, and his internal polling is reportedly equally bad. Trump tweeted a memo from his pollster Monday alleging that CNN's "fake" poll and others are aimed at harming him electorally.

"Trump allies fear the election is now shaping up as a simple referendum on Trump and his performance in the White House — with recent polling showing Trump losing ground with noneducated white voters, senior citizens, Catholics, and evangelicals," Politico reports. "Trump himself has grown frustrated by the negative polling in recent weeks, confounded by Biden's lead and frustrated by his own campaign actions and execution of strategy during the pandemic."

With Trump "growing increasingly agitated with the state of his re-election campaign," his campaign came up with a plan, Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng report at The Daily Beast: "Run a series of hard-hitting ads and place them on networks that they knew the president and congressional Republicans would watch. And so, over the past month, the Trump campaign has spent slightly more than $400,000 on cable news ads in the Washington, D.C., area, buying time largely on Fox News but with some smaller buys on CNN and MSNBC as well, according to filings with the Federal Communications Commission."

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There's little chance the ad buys will sway solidly blue Washington, D.C., Maryland, or Northern Virginia. Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh explained to The Daily Beast that "we want members of Congress and our D.C.-based surrogates to see the ads so they know our strong arguments for President Trump and against Joe Biden." But a Trump campaign adviser and person close to Trump told Markay and Suebsaeng that the real goal was "to put the president himself at ease" and assure him "his formidable political machine is hard at work defending him and attacking his enemies." Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.