Ahhh, so this is how the 2020 presidential campaign is going to proceed.

The Donald John Trump re-election team is going to fabricate straw men, prey on people’s xenophobia and then suggest that a true-blue, red-blooded American politician is actually an agent representing a hostile power.

The Trump campaign has released a minute-long ad that implies that former Washington Gov. Gary Locke, who was born in Washington and who served as U.S. ambassador to China during the Obama administration, is a Chinese government agent.

Oh, I should mention that Locke is Chinese-American. He also is a friend and ally of Joseph R. Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

This is, as former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, described it, “utter garbage.” He said also that “Gary Locke is as American as the day is long.”

The ad is intended to suggest that Biden is more loyal to China than he is to the United States, that he and his son, Hunter, have business dealings in the People’s Republic of China … which I guess in Trump’s vacuous noggin makes him disloyal.

It’s reprehensible in the extreme. The campaign’s effort to cast a native-born American as a foreign agent makes it even worse. Wherever he is, the late U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy — the infamous commie-hunter of the early 1950s — must be nodding in approval.

Disgraceful.