Rick Wilson during today’s (4.21) “The New Abnormal” Daily Beast podcast, starting at 4:30:

“Joe Biden scans….look, back in the old days, when we [Wilson and his fellow Republican strategist] were trying to run against Barack Obama in 2009 and ’12, we threw everything [we could think of] at the guy…’he’s a socialist, he’s a Communist, he was educated by Bill Ayers‘….all this stuff, right?

“But Obama scanned to voters. I sat in a dozen focus groups and listened to them tell me, ‘Oh, he seems like a moderate guy, I kind of like him, he’s a good dude.’ And you couldn’t break it. You couldn’t break it.

“With Joe Biden, they believe there’s a fundamental decency…they may think he’s goofy, a little bit of an oddball, tells wacky anecdotes…but a lot of voters don’t think Joe Biden has malice. And a lot of voters do…a majority, a good solid majority of voters think that Donald Trump is corrupt and mendacious and does have a degree of cruelty in him.

“That idea, that the president can be nasty and transgressive and a dick…it kind of plays when there’s peace and prosperity. It doesn’t play when we’re in a Great Depression, Part Two. And when we don’t know how this disease is gonna play out, and how many people are gonna die. That suddenly is more serious to voters.”

The Trump/Republican/Open Up slogan for the 2020 election: “If grandma has to die in order to open things up and get the economy rolling again, then grandma has to die. And maybe your brother or brother-in-law in the bargain. We’re sorry but these are tough times and tough choices need to be made. Life is hard but the strong survive.”

The podcast title is “Dope Fiend for the Dow Jones.” Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast. The full podcast runs 25 minutes.