Donald Trump can’t handle a taste of his own medicine
There have already been a number of effective TV ads aimed at Donald Trump during this still-unfolding election cycle. Some of them have come from the Joe Biden campaign. Some of them have come from liberal groups. But the most effective TV ads against Trump seem to keep coming from anti-Trump republican groups.
Yesterday’s new “Mourning in America” TV ad from the Lincoln Project has been so effective right out of the gate, Donald Trump has already thrown two tirades about it, thirteen hours apart. He’s clearly worried about the prospect of republicans voting against him, because in a presidential election, any amount of party crossover spells doom (ask the democrats about 1984). But there’s another reason why these republican anti-Trump ads are working so well.
Republican political operatives are never afraid to punch below the belt. These operatives are accustomed to working for weak, corrupt, worthless republican candidates who can only win by going after the superior democratic candidate in ugly fashion. Now some of these republican operatives are taking ugly shots at Donald Trump, in an effort at helping the democrats for once. They’re not being dishonest in how they’re going after Trump – they’re just being brutally ugly about it, like he deserves.
It’s not that democratic political operatives don’t have it in them to fight ugly. It’s that everyone inherently knows the liberals are the good guys. Accordingly, the left, the center, the right, and the media have always held the left to a much higher standard. Liberals in particular have been traditionally known for nitpicking their own side to death, making democratic operatives afraid of hitting the other side too hard, lest liberal observers end up deciding that the democratic operatives are somehow the bad guys.
But after three years of Donald Trump burning America to the ground, this is an entirely different era. Joe Biden launched an ad this week depicting Donald Trump as a pathetic crybaby, complete with a “cry me a river” soundtrack. We’ll see more of those kinds of ads coming from the left. But for now, it’s the anti-Trump republicans who are most at ease making these kinds of ugly ads. No wonder Trump is so worried about some of the GOP’s most effective operatives now playing for the other team.
