Trump rails at 'loser types' as dissident Republican ad gets under his skin
A political ad criticizing Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has prompted a string of name-calling, angry tweets from the president, in which he derided his critics as “loser types”.
While Twitter rants are common for the president, this series has the flavor of personal grudge. The ad, called Mourning in America, was produced by a group of anti-Trump Republicans, prominently co-founded by the husband of one of Trump’s senior advisers.
The ad riffs on former president Ronald Reagan’s classic 1984 re-election ad, Morning in America, a one-minute commercial where young Americans get married, buy a home and raise the flag.
In contrast, Mourning in America show a decrepit factory, a body wheeled away on a gurney, and Americans lining up in the rain in masks, presumably to get coronavirus tests.
The ad was produced by an independent political group, known as a Super Pac, called the Lincoln Project. The group was formed by anti-Trump Republicans and, crucially, George T Conway III, who is married to the senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway.
The federal government response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been described to the Guardian, in earlier reporting, as “one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times”.
An early lack of testing allowed the virus to spread and become rampant through American cities for six weeks. Shortages of tests continue to hamper government response.
Despite the lack of tests and a lack of contact tracing to prevent future outbreaks, some states, predominantly Republican-controlled ones, have begun to reopen.
The virus has laid bare longstanding social inequities in American society, disproportionately hitting low-income people and people of color.