The president went after Joe Biden vigorously over the weekend on the Burisma meeting. He has the goods on Biden and he knows it. But can the president break through the major media and social media blackout of the story and get it to the American people by Election Day? Time will tell.

“Did you see what’s happening with Biden? He’s a corrupt politician,” Trump said in Carson City, Nevada on Sunday night. When one fan yelled “lock her up” the old Hillary Clinton line, Trump corrected, “no, lock him up…Joe Biden is and always has been a corrupt politician. He always has been. And as far as I’m concerned, the Biden family is a criminal enterprise. It really is.”

Whoa. That is not subtle but that is exactly what the president needs to do. He needs to paint the Bidens, not the Cuomos, as the Corleones. Only this version of the Corleones is run by two Fredos. But there could be a trap here on the family theme. Biden could hit back by describing what happened to his family the night he was elected to the Senate in 1972. His wife and child were killed in a car crash. Then he could bring up his dead son Beau, an Army vet. The president needs to be aggressive here, but be careful. Lest he step on a political mine.

The president mocked Biden in Nevada for telling him to “listen to the scientists” in his handling of the virus. Trump told the crowd, “If I listened to the scientists, we would have a country right now that would be in a massive depression. Now, we’re like a rocketship. Look at the [economic] numbers.”

Biden campaign spox Andrew Bates responded, “Donald Trump tanked the strong economy he inherited from the Obama-Biden Administration by continually discounting and attacking warnings from the scientific and medical experts working around the clock to save lives. Now, new coronavirus cases are surging and layoffs are rising. If Donald Trump had listened to Joe Biden when he urged him not to trust the Chinese government over his own scientific advisers about this crisis, he wouldn’t be the worst jobs president since 1929.”

That statement is laughable. But it’s what they’ve got and the Democrats are going with it. So it looks like the final message duel will be this: Democrats attacking on virus, Trump, and the economy. Republicans defending on what the economy was before Covid-19, and attacking on law and order and the corruption of the Biden family.

Democrats will have every platform in existence to make their arguments. Republicans will sometimes have Fox News, conservative media, and sometimes social media. Thus the Republican ground game, now until Election Day, will be all important.

Various pro-Trump PACs are spending big money in battleground states, allowing campaign money to redeploy to get out the vote efforts. This will be a sprint to the finish that will end up in the courts for a December or January decision.

But who seems to come out on top in the Electoral College on Election Day will matter to a point. Hence Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Iowa will decide the position the president will take into court. For America’s sake, it must be a strong one.