The mounting coronavirus death toll is at the forefront of Americans’ concern, but it was a sharp political attack ad that drew the ire of President Donald Trump in the wee hours of Tuesday.
The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group headed by George Conway, husband of key Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, started broadcasting a minute-long ad Monday which said more than 60,000 Americans have died from the “deadly virus Trump ignored.”
The ad, running six months before the November presidential election between Trump and former Democratic Vice President Joe Biden, was called “Mourning in America.”
The ad was a dystopian version of one of the most prominent U.S. political ads ever, former President Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” portrait of a flourishing United States as he successfully ran for reelection in 1984.
But the Lincoln Project ad called attention to dilapidated houses, a worried man in a hospital corridor, vacant industrial buildings, a man applying for unemployment compensation and a long line of Americans wearing masks to protect themselves from the virus.
“There’s mourning in America,” the ad concluded. “And under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is weaker, sicker and poorer. And now, Americans are asking, ‘If we have another four years like this, will there even be an America?’"
After midnight Monday in Washington, Trump responded on Twitter.
“I don’t know what Kellyanne did to her deranged loser of a husband, Moonface, but it must have been really bad.”
He derided the sponsors of the ad as “RINO Republicans,” Republicans In Name Only, “who failed badly 12 years ago, then again 8 years ago, and then got BADLY beaten by me, a political first timer, 4 years ago.”
Trump said they had “copied (no imagination) the concept of an ad from Ronald Reagan, “Morning in America,” doing everything possible to get even for all of their many failures.
“You see, these loser types don’t care about 252 new Federal Judges, 2 great Supreme Court Justices, a rebuilt military, a protected 2nd Amendment, biggest EVER Tax & Regulation cuts, and much more. I didn’t use any of them because they don’t know how to win, and their so-called Lincoln Project is a disgrace to Honest Abe.
“They’re all LOSERS, but Abe Lincoln, Republican, is all smiles!” Trump concluded.
