I'm Ryan Grimm. Welcome to Deconstructed.

This is going to be bigger than four years ago. There's more enthusiasm. The crowds are bigger.

Donald Trump has spent the 2020 campaign and arguably his entire presidency trying to recreate

the conditions that brought him his improbable victory four years ago. He still rails against

crooked Hillary. And he clings to the hope that once again a laptop and its salacious

contents will swing things his way. But there's a problem with that plan. Trump is running

against Joe Biden, not Hillary Clinton. Trump's major advantage against Clinton came down

to perceptions of their respective integrity. By the fall of 2016, Trump was even outpacing

Clinton on the question of who was more honest and trustworthy, a startling data point given

Trump's Olympian pension for dishonesty. Trump doesn't have that edge against Biden,

and it helps explain why attacks that stuck to Clinton slide off Biden's back. For his

approach to work, Trump really needs a major corruption scandal to erode Biden's image,

deserved or not as a trustworthy and honest man. Where Gallup found 33% of voters believed

Clinton was honest and trustworthy in 2016, this year, that number is 52 for Biden. In that

gap lies Biden's decisive electoral edge. In a world where voters aren't enthusiastic

about either candidate, they side with the one they find less objectionable. Right now,

that's Joe Biden.

The Trump campaign's hope is that two weeks of conversation about Hunter Biden's influence

peddling, ginned up by Rudy Giuliani, can narrow the gap enough to eke out a win. That's

probably a fool's errand for any number of reasons. One major problem for Trump is that

even with emails and text messages showing Hunter and his business partners clearly

intent on leveraging the Biden name for financial gain, nothing definitively sticks to Joe

...