Joe Biden announced his entry into the 2020 Democratic primary early yesterday morning with a video heavily referencing the events in Charlottesville that happened in 2017. Specifically, the death of a young women named Heather Heyer, who was killed by a white supremacist coward attending the “United the Right” rally put on by Richard Spencer. He then sought to use those events as a cudgel against Donald Trump as part of the roll out of his candidacy.

That roll out has been rocky, to say the least.

all right well it's been fun I guess pic.twitter.com/tkukZyw2zB

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) April 25, 2019

It’s about to get rockier as The Daily Beast is reporting that Biden made that video without the consent of the deceased family.

Joe Biden did not tell Susan Bro, Heather Heyer’s mother, that he would be invoking her daughter’s murder in Charlottesville in August 2017 in his presidential campaign launch video focusing on “the battle for the soul” of America.

“But I wasn’t surprised,” Bro, co-founder of the Heather Heyer Foundation set up in her daughter’s memory, told The Daily Beast. “Most people do that sort of thing. They capitalize on whatever situation is handy. He didn’t reach out to me, and didn’t mention her by name specifically, and he probably knew we don’t endorse candidates.”

How is he so bad at this? How do you not let the family know you are going to invoke their daughter?

There are some things that should be off limits. This is one of those things. A woman died because of the evil actions of a single man. Trying to twist that into a campaign slogan about this being a “battle for the soul of nation” so Biden can paint himself as a savior is gutter trash politics. I’m not sure which of his new advisors came up with this idea, but they should probably be fired.

Look, if Biden wants to go after Trump, go after him. We’ll see how that works out for him. But exploiting the death of a young woman and trying to equate the President with white supremacy in order to score political points is just gross. There are a million other, legitimate ways to attack Trump. Politicizing tragedy isn’t one of them.