Trump campaign TV ads don’t mention pandemic
The death toll keeps rising as COVID-19 rages across Florida, Arizona and other campaign battlegrounds, but the television ads President Donald Trump is airing in those states say nothing about the coronavirus pandemic that has upended life for all Americans. It’s a conspicuous omission. Nearly every day, states that could decide the Nov. 3 election break new records of sickness and death. Nationwide, the virus has killed 140,000 people. Yet the $30 million in TV ads that Trump has run so far this month in his bid for a second term dodge the subject of how he is steering the country through one of the worst calamities any modern president has faced.
Instead, Trump’s ads falsely accuse his Democratic rival Joe Biden of trying to defund police. They claim the former vice president would endanger children by letting violent crime explode in cities overrun by protesters who vandalize stores and set buildings on fire. They suggest Biden would bow to “the radical left-wing mob.”
It’s not unusual for an incumbent in trouble to try to divert attention from tough times or define an opponent in negative terms, said Erika Franklin Fowler, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political ads. But the epic scale of the pandemic’s damage to the nation makes it all but impossible to avoid, she said.
“It just becomes stranger and stranger that he doesn’t find a way to talk about what he’s doing about it,” she said.
Trump’s exclusion of the coronavirus from his advertising comes as polls show most Americans disapprove of his response to the pandemic. For months, Trump has played down the health threat while stoking racism with incendiary remarks over Confederate monuments and Black Lives Matter protests.
Historian David M. Kennedy sees parallels to President Herbert Hoover’s struggles when he ran for reelection in 1932 after the Great Depression had erupted on his watch, opening the way for Franklin D. Roosevelt to unseat him.
“You don’t want to call attention to all of the egg that’s all over your face,” said Kennedy, the author of “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War.”
“The examples of other countries that have more successfully dealt with this matter tell us that a different kind of leadership could have done better, and historians will try to figure out why Trump has proven so inept in the face of this particular crisis.”