Rove argued that Trump had already waited too long to define his opponent. By this point in the 2004 cycle, when Rove was running his re-election campaign, George W. Bush had already painted John Kerry as a flip-flopping elitist, and by spring of 2012, Obama had already defined Mitt Romney as a heartless, job-killing plutocrat. “You have to disqualify your opponent,” Rove said. “You’re late.” The task was admittedly harder for Trump than for his predecessors. As long as the nation’s consuming focus was the coronavirus, the campaign was effectively a referendum on Trump and that was a dynamic
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