The Trump campaign, of course
Daniel Dale at CNN fact checks this piece of garbage:
On Friday, we published an article about how former President Donald Trump’s campaign has made a habit of deceptively using quotations in television ads attacking Vice President Kamala Harris.Then, just days later, the campaign released perhaps the most egregious example yet.
A new minute-long ad revives two of the quote distortions from previous Trump ads – and sprinkles in two more for good measure. Here is a fact check.
Cutting out key words about Harris and taxes
The new ad cuts out critical words from a news article about Harris’ tax proposals.
The ad, like a previous Trump ad, features the following on-screen text attributed to an August article in The New York Times: “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes.” But as the Times itself has noted, this is a misleading snip. What the Times article actually said was this: “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.”
That’s a big difference.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this article. For the Friday article on the campaign’s misleading use of quotations, the campaign declined to address any of the specific examples we raised; instead, spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, “President Trump has the hardest-hitting, most well produced ads in the business.”
Cutting out a key word about Harris and the border
The new ad also deletes a crucial word from a news article about immigration policy.
The ad features the following on-screen text the ad attributes to a CBS News piece in September: “Harris vows to keep Biden’s border.” The text is accompanied by a narrator saying, falsely, that “Kamala was in charge of his open-border policies.”
But what the CBS News article’s headline actually said was this: “Harris vows to keep Biden’s border crackdown: ‘The United States is a sovereign nation.’” The article began: “During a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris vowed to keep President Biden’s asylum crackdown in place if elected, solidifying Democrats’ embrace of more stringent immigration rules.”
Taking an immigration quote out of context
The ad features on-screen text that says, “welfare for illegals,” attributing those words to an NBC News article from 2018.
But as we noted when a previous Trump ad featured similar on-screen text, that NBC News article did not even mention Biden or Harris, whose administration did not begin until 2021. And the article used the phrase “welfare for illegal immigrants” only in passing – in a totally different context than the Trump ad uses it.
The article criticized occupational licensing rules that were preventing immigrants enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program from working in certain jobs. It said: “It’s a complete travesty that otherwise qualified individuals can’t get the government’s permission to cut hair. Regardless of one’s position on welfare for illegal immigrants, a license is clearly different from food stamps and other government safety nets.”
Taking a quote about national security out of context
The new ad features giant on-screen text with the words “global war,” attributing them to a July article by the media outlet Axios, as the ad’s narrator says, “Their weakness invited wars.”
But the Axios article did not claim there is “global war” under the Biden administration. The article was headlined, “U.S. not ready for global war, commission warns”; it was about a bipartisan commission’s findings about the country’s preparedness for hypothetical future conflict, not about the present situation.
Luckily most people don’t actually watch TV ads anymore. But online, the comments to this ad are “wow, they’re using Kamala’s own words against her.”
There have always been misleading and hysterical ads in political campaigns and it isn’t confined to the Republicans (although they’ve made a fetish of it.) But with Trump it’s just “anything goes” and there’s very little blowback because everyone knows he’s a pathological liar and that’s just par for the course. I suspect all the other Republicans are watching and learning that the key is to lie so flagrantly that it shocks people and never admit you are wrong.
This isn’t going to go away when Trump finally shuffles off to Mar-a-lago for the last time (whenever that will be.) It’s the new ethosewhich, combined with organized disinformation, is going to make politics a lethal minefield for a long time to come.