Amid the most unusual presidential election in decades, the Trump campaign is turning to a very familiar Republican line of attack in two new ads: that Joseph R. Biden Jr. will raise your taxes.

The Message

The ad is built around the message that President Trump had planned to run on before the virus struck: a humming economy. A small-business owner, standing on a peaceful, leafy suburban street, praises the president for “the economy that we’ve been enjoying.” She portrays electing Mr. Biden as a move that would devastate the economic progress that was underway before the pandemic.

She accuses Mr. Biden of wanting to add more taxes and regulation, as the ad displays a selectively edited clip of Mr. Biden from the campaign trail saying “if you elect me your taxes will go up.”

In closing, the small business owner says what the Trump campaign has been hoping will hold true in polling: that she trusts Mr. Trump to rebuild the economy.

Fact Check

Mr. Biden will not raise taxes across the board. Rather, he is proposing raising taxes on people earning more than $400,000 to help finance much of his agenda for recovering from the coronavirus pandemic.

The ad also begins with an allusion to “the economy that we’ve been enjoying,” but the current economic status of the country is in shambles because of the coronavirus pandemic, with unemployment at 8.4 percent.

And while the economy before the coronavirus was indeed strong, with low unemployment and a soaring stock market, it’s not wholly accurate to proclaim it was “the best it had ever been,” as the video claims. Income inequality continued to grow, and while average hourly wage growth improved, it was not as strong as in decades past. The employment cost index, while also improved, was not the highest ever.

Where It’s Running

North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania and two states that split electoral votes by congressional district: Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District and Maine’s 2nd Congressional District.

The Takeaway

While the bully pulpit of the president’s Twitter account continues to rail against protesters and cast false aspersions about voting, the paid messaging arm of the Trump campaign is increasingly focused on an economic message.

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