AS EXPECTED: TRUMP CAMPAIGN PRODUCES AD THAT LIES ABOUT HIS COMPETITION

…Joe Biden at a Las Vegas union get-together

Trump continues to try using his lying as a positive trait

As expected, our president that continually lies, he is applying that lying trait to his initial campaign ads.  In the latest ad against his presumptive opponent, Joe Biden, Trump is saying that Joe Biden is in support of “defunding the police”.

The former vice president has firmly rejected calls from left-wing activists to “defund the police.”  Clearly, the Trump campaign wants to tag him with that confusing slogan. So his campaign has produced an ad that slickly tries to hit Biden around this ‘defunding’ idea.

The Trump campaign obviously thinks their effort is a big winner.  Ben Taber, the Trump account manager at Advertising Analytics, says that as of mid-July, the Trump campaign had spent $6.7 million placing the lying ad on network television and on local stations in Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Arizona, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nevada, Iowa, New Mexico and Michigan.

But, factually, the ad is a serious losing lie.

The ad says:  “Joe Biden’s supporters are fighting to defund police departments. Violent crime has exploded. You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

The scenes of looting and violence in the ad come from some of the recent video of the looting that took place after George Floyd’s death-in-police-custody in Minneapolis.  So these images are actually, technically “Donald Trump’s America”, not Joe Biden’s. (You may later see an ad from the Biden campaign saying exactly that!)

The ad is a made-up story framed around an fake unanswered phone call to a police station.  Per the ad: “You have reached the 9-1-1 police emergency line,” a voice says on an answering machine. “Due to defunding of the police department, we’re sorry but no one is here to take your call. If you are calling to report a rape, please press one. To report a murder, press two. To report a home invasion, press three. For all other crimes, leave your name and number and someone will get back to you. Our estimated wait time is currently five days. Goodbye.”

Toward the end of this hellish fantasy, the text reads: “Joe Biden’s supporters are fighting to defund police departments. Violent crime has exploded. You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

Note the use of “Joe Biden’s supporters”?  The Trump campaign can’t actually tag Biden, so it is tryng "guilt by association".

The line about supporters comes from a Fox News report in early June. But as it turns out, the article is not about Joe Biden, it turns out that it is only about one supporter: Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.).

First, you must understand just what the phrase: “defund the police” actually means. It has never meant to get rid of the police departments.  It also does not mean eliminating the police.  Instead, the advocates of the phrase want to redirect some police funds that are now spent on the police forces, to items such as public health, housing and youth services. The idea is that low-income communities would become stronger, and less in need of police, if their actual root problems were addressed head-on.

Under this concept, some police officers would be replaced with trained social workers or specialized response teams in an effort to let police focus on violent crime, as they were meant to in the first place.  Not mental illness situations or drug overdoses or homeless issues. The theory is that police would be better positioned to deal with rapes and murders if they were not required to deal with other social ills that sometimes lead to community confrontations with police.

But this ‘catchphrase’ of “defund the police” can be easily twisted by the Trump campaign to mean something else.  In New York City, for instance, Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed to a budget deal that would divert about $1 billion, or 17%, of the police budget to fund projects for youth living in public housing projects.

The Trump ad claims “violent crime has exploded,” and the source of that info leads to an ABC News report titled, “Why some police officials believe crime is on the rise in US cities.” The answer, according to a survey of four cities by the Police Executive Research Forum, is that the coronavirus pandemic led to the release of offenders in jails and the closure of courts to process new crimes. The report also said police had less time to investigate crimes because they were spending their efforts monitoring street protests.

That’s a pretty slim read on which to rest this serious claim. The Trump campaign also uses references to articles about increases in violence in New York, Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Los Angeles.

The tag line: “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” is totally ridiculous.

The Trump campaign might have a case for this ad, if Biden were a strong supporter of eliminating police departments. But, instead, even as Fox News reported in early June, Biden opposes the concept.

Per Biden: “No, I don‘t support defunding the police,” Biden said in a CBS interview cited in the Fox report. “I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness and, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community and everybody in the community.”

Biden, in fact, has come under fire from the left for his position and for proposing to spend an additional $300 million a year on the community policing program started in the Clinton administration.  “More than 50 liberal groups signed a letter Monday to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden criticizing his response to the emerging protest movement against police brutality, warning that failing to embrace a more aggressive agenda risks alienating the African American voters he needs to win the election,” The Washington Post reported this in June..

Biden has argued the correct response is to prod police departments is to get closer to their communities and undertake reforms. “The vast majority of police are decent, honorable people, but there are bad apples, man. And we have to change the way in which we teach police. We have to release all the information,” he said at a recent fundraiser. “We have to make sure that we deal with an entire new set of standards at the federal level like Barack [Obama] and I were doing before we left office. There’s so much we can do, the country is ready to do it. We don’t have to defund the police departments, we have to make sure they meet minimum basic standards of decency. And the vast majority of police, they want that to happen.”

The Trump campaign lied again when they said the interview Biden had with activist Ady Barkan had bolstered their case.

During the interview, Barkan said, “We can reduce the responsibilities assigned to the police and redirect some of the funding for police into social services, mental health counseling and affordable housing.”

He asked Biden, “Are you open to that kind of reform?”  In the video, Biden replies, “I’ve proposed that kind of reform.”  At another point, Barkan again asks: “But so we agree that we can redirect some of the funding?” The video shows Biden saying: “Yes, absolutely.”

Not exactly a bolster of Trump’s campaign.

This video does not include Biden adding that his response was different from the idea of “defunding all the police.”  He speaks about increasing funding for mental health, which is different from saying he would fund mental health aid out of redirected funds from the police.  In effect, Biden says he would condition aid on police reforms as an incentive on the one hand, while simultaneously providing additional resources for mental health, homelessness and other kinds of community support.

The real point here is that the multi-million dollar ad from the Trump campaign is a perfect example of our lying president continuing to lie about his opponent early on in this campaign.

It also an example where the opposition can now do their own ad that shows where Trump continues to lie about his competition.

Don’t be surprised if a multi-million dollar ad is presented by the Democrats showing that Donald Trump continues to lie to the voters over and over and over again.

One more example for why we need to get rid of this horrible stain on the US presidency ASAP.

Copyright G. Ater 2020