Team Biden debuted an attack ad against President Trump last weekend. The subject is Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, specifically his alleged softness toward China. It must be a shock to Team Biden now, though, since the ad is receiving criticism from fellow Democrats.

Don’t you love a good left on left battle? It won’t last long because Democrats are really nervous over Joe’s ability to go the distance and win in November against President Trump but while we can enjoy it, we should. There is nothing better than watching the woke left handle criticism felt from their own as a mirror is held up to them. It turns out that all the pearl-clutching on the left about racism and xenophobia when President Trump closed off air travel from China at the end of January at the suggestion of experts backfired. As it turns out, that act is probably the single most important one that Trump did to head off what could have been a far worse outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. The coronavirus originated in Wuhan China. There is no dispute of that fact.

Team Biden used video clips of Beijing Joe throughout the ad, mostly highlighting his superior ability to predict the coming devastation of the pandemic. There is no evidence that he would have done anything differently than Trump, but the problem with the ad for the critics is that Sleepy Joe criticizes Trump for not being even more strict in eliminating entrance into the U.S. for Chinese travelers. The ad specifically references 40,000 Chinese who were allowed into America. Chinese-Americans and others on the left say, hold on, Joe. Isn’t that racist and xenophobic?

Biden supporters loved the ad. Biden really owned Trump, didn’t he? Trump critics from the center-right loved it, too. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough tweeted, “This is the most devastating political ad I’ve seen in years.” Well, it was a bit too clever by half, say others. First, here is the ad and a typical tweet in favor of it.

This @JoeBiden ad is one of the very best I've ever seen. pic.twitter.com/3VGUSjjXJC

— Matt Rogers 🗳 (@Politidope) April 18, 2020

Now the response from a critic on the left. The critic, by the way, is a civil rights lawyer and deputy legal director, National ACLU, so there’s that.

Wow ⁦@JoeBiden⁩. Already trying to out-Trump Trump. This kind of fearmongering is causing violent attacks on Asian Americans. If you are trying to reform your past history of racist policymaking, like your 1994 crime bill, you had better do some homework. This ain’t it. pic.twitter.com/ePHiVGQFf3

— Cecillia Wang 王德棻 (@WangCecillia) April 19, 2020

A policy person at the Cato Institute said it shows Biden in a hawkish way against China and we know that liberals aren’t interested in any of that kind of thing, don’t we? She apparently prefers going back to the days of the Obama-Biden administration when they were busy decimating U.S. military readiness.

In an e-mail, Emma Ashford, a research fellow in defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute, noted that the ad implied a hawkish foreign policy, with Biden promising to stand up to the Chinese government. Apparently it is more important to her to go back to the days of the Obama-Biden administration’s decimating the readiness of the U.S. military.

“First, I think politically this does Joe Biden no favors, as it effectively buys into Trump’s narrative on the virus,” Ashford informed me. “Clearly, they’re trying to criticize Trump here, but they’re buying his argument more broadly, arguing that this was a foreign virus, and he should have dealt with China more strictly, rather than the alternate narrative that pandemics are a known threat, and Trump undermined our ability to respond effectively. It still pins much of the blame on China.”

The ad, Ashford argues, is “bad for the future of Democrats’ foreign policy. It’s going to be very difficult to make progress on cutting the defense budget, ‘ending endless war,’ or other progressive priorities in foreign policy if a Biden administration effectively adopts the Trump administration’s model of confrontation with China.”

The ads are trying to paint Trump as weak against China. They are in response to the Trump campaign’s ads showing Biden’s connections to China and that extends down to his son, as well. The problem for the critics on the left is that Biden’s message conflates the Chinese government with the Chinese people. “Trump praised the Chinese.” Oops.

On Friday, Biden’s presidential campaign responded with an ad that correctly chides Trump for his botched response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Then the ad added, “So now, Trump and his allies are launching negative attacks against Joe Biden to hide the truth. Here are the facts: Joe Biden warned the nation in January that Trump had left us unprepared for an epidemic.” The ad goes on to say, “When Trump rolled over for the Chinese, he took their word for it. Trump praised the Chinese 15 times in January and February as the coronavirus spread across the world.”

Also in the ad is criticism of the Trump administration’s alleged failure to get a team from the CDC into China to get information about the pandemic. This is a false claim. There was already a team of analysts on the ground in Beijing. The number of people had been reduced but there was still an adequate amount there. When the CDC and WHO offered to send in teams to monitor and do analysis, both were denied by the Chinese government.

“The problem was China, not that we didn’t have CDC people in China,” said Scott McNabb, a former CDC epidemiologist who is now a research professor with Emory University. He pointed to China’s censorship as the main culprit in the spread of the pandemic, which has infected at least 435,470 people worldwide, killed 19,598 and upended the global economy.

Biden and Democrats, in general, are only too happy to go along with the Chinese communist narrative about the coronavirus. Instead of taking potshots at Trump and his administration’s efforts, Biden should be calling out the brutal dictatorship in China that lies and hides the facts from the world. China lied, thousands died.

Remember, the Biden campaign is all about going back, not moving forward. Joe Biden, campaigning on uniting the country and on bringing civility back to public discourse, is running campaign ads critical of President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. Instead of encouraging people to do as the experts say in order to get through this national shutdown and help the country get back on its feet, Biden is finger-pointing and name-calling. That’s not leadership, it’s petty partisan politics and the status quo.