Worst Ever? Fact-Checker Slams Trump Ad as ‘Most Egregious Example Yet
[Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Donald Trump’s campaign has deployed deceptively edited quotes in a number of its television ads during the election campaign, but CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale called out its latest spot as the “most egregious example yet.”
The former president’s recent campaign spots are littered with deceptively edited quotations that omit critical words or present misleading comments from Trump’s campaign or administration officials as if they were taken from independent news organizations, but Dale said a new ad on Kamala Harris’ tax policies may be the worst yet.
“The Trump campaign has made a habit of deceptively using quotes in its TV ads, cutting out words and taking stuff way out of context,” Dale posted on X. “Then the campaign released the most egregious example yet. Here’s a thread on deceptive quotes in its new ad.”
The ad presents a quote from the New York Times claiming that “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes,” but the full sentence in the report shows “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.”
The campaign plays the same trick with a CBS News report on President Joe Biden’s so-called “open-border policies,” as the ad’s narrator intones.
“The ad purports to quote CBS as writing, ‘Harris vows to keep Biden’s border,'” Dale wrote. “Here’s what CBS actually wrote: ‘Harris vows to keep Biden’s border crackdown: “The United States is a sovereign nation.”‘
The Republican campaign quotes NBC News as writing “welfare for illegals,” but the report is from six years ago, when Trump was president.
“The NBC story is from 2018, before the Biden-Harris term began…and it doesn’t mention them,” Dale wrote. “It’s about licensing rules keeping DACA recipients out of some jobs. It mentions ‘welfare for illegal immigrants’ in passing.”
The ad finally quotes Axios as writing about “GLOBAL WAR,” but the article in question wasn’t about the Biden-Harris administration but was instead about a bipartisan commission that determined the U.S. isn’t prepared for a hypothetical global war in the future.
“This stuff is incredibly obvious when you look up the source of the claims,” Dale wrote, “but most viewers, of course, are not going to look up the source for the claims.”
