Quoting out of context

| 3:00 pm EDT October 31, 2024
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How do you signal to the world that you’re losing an election to a superior adversary without actually saying it out loud, in so many words? You run political ads full of lies. You quote your adversary out of context, so much so that the out-of-context quote means the exact opposite of what was originally said. You try to frighten people into believing that your adversary will start a major war, possibly World War III.

So that’s exactly what Donald Trump and the screaming MAGA fruitcakes he calls a campaign staff have done. They have just told us that they are frightened. They have just told us that they know they’re losing and they’re desperate. And they did it in exactly sixty seconds.

The new minute-long Trump ad revives two quote distortions from previous Trump ads, and includes two more for good measure. They are so easy to refute that the ads themselves may ultimately harm Trump’s campaign. Of course, the ads will work with MAGA, but those votes don’t count because MAGA loonies are going to vote for Trump anyway, even if Trump himself breaks into their homes and murders their grandmothers in cold blood in front of them.

But the ads just might backfire among the undecided voters, especially if Kamala Harris decides to run ads contradicting them. Even if she doesn’t, the lies in the ads are so flimsy that many people will see through them.

Let me count the ways. First, Trump’s new ad features the following “quote” from The New York Times: “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes.” The actual New York Times itself provides the refutation. What the Times article actually said was, “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.” Not only does this new ad deliberately distort the meaning of the quote, it could serve to not-so-subtly remind voters that make-believe billionaire Donald is in fact a friend of the rich and cares nothing about anybody else, especially them.

Trump’s ad also deletes a crucial word from a news article about immigration policy.
The ad features the following on-screen text the ad attributes to a September piece from CBS News: “Harris vows to keep Biden’s border.” The text is accompanied by a voiceover saying, falsely, that “Kamala was in charge of his open-border policies.” In fact she was not.

But what the CBS article actually originally said was: “Harris vows to keep Biden’s border crackdown.” Then it quotes Kamala directly, reminding Americans that “The United States is a sovereign nation.” The article goes on to say, “During a visit to the US-Mexico border on Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris vowed to keep President Biden’s asylum crackdown in place if elected, solidifying Democrats’ embrace of more stringent immigration rules.”

In other words, Trump’s insistence that Kamala wants an open border is an out-and-out lie. She wants the opposite. In fact, Kamala Harris backed the Republican-authored bipartisan bill that would have significantly beefed up the United States Border Patrol. Trump ordered his MAGA cronies to kill the bill because he was afraid it would leak out that Biden’s policies were working at the border.

Next the ad features on-screen text saying simply, “welfare for illegals,” and attributes those words to an NBC News article from 2018. There’s just one problem. Biden and Harris weren’t in power in 2018. Trump was. And the context of the quote had nothing to do with a plan to provide welfare for undocumented aliens in the United States. Other than that, yeah, spot on, Trump.

Finally the ad “quotes” an Axios article with just the words, “global war.” But the original article was headlined, “U.S. not ready for global war, commission warns.” It was about a bipartisan commission’s findings concerning America’s preparedness for a hypothetical future global conflict. It had nothing to do with anyone’s policies, certainly not the policies of Kamala Harris.

In short, MAGA Republicans have existentially confessed that they have no qualms whatsoever about the policies of Kamala Harris. You might even take that a little farther. You might say they’re all for Kamala’s policies, except possibly the bit about taxing the rich. So Trump and company have just handed Kamala the ultimate compliment. They’ve let the world know that they can’t find a single bad thing to say about Kamala Harris. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.