Ever thought you’d hear President Trump admit he failed at managing the COVID-19 pandemic? Us neither, but that didn’t stop the Biden campaign from taking some cues from the Trump campaign in crafting its latest attack ad.
Coming in response to the Trump campaign’s ad released last week, which featured comments from Dr. Anthony Fauci that he says were taken out of context and used without his permission, the Biden campaign edited together clearly different, out-of-context snippets of Trump’s public speeches to make it sound like Trump is saying, “I am failing at managing the coronavirus outbreak, so I used Dr. Fauci in an ad to say I’m doing a good job. But it’s fake. He never said that.”
“He meant it for the task force, not me. Sorry to Dr. Fauci, and sorry to everyone else,” the pieced together clips of Trump also say.
Last week, the Trump campaign released a new ad that included a clip of Fauci that appeared as if the nation’s top infectious diseases expert was praising the president for his handling of the pandemic.
“President Trump is recovering from the coronavirus, and so is America,” a narrator for the ad says. “Together we rose to meet the challenge, protecting our seniors, getting them life-saving drugs in record time, sparing no expense.”
Fauci then appears in the ad to say, “I can’t imagine that anybody could be doing more.”
But in a statement on Sunday, Fauci said the comments were attributed without his permission and taken out of context. And, indeed, the clip itself is taken from a March interview Fauci did on Fox News, in which he was speaking more broadly about the efforts that federal public health officials and the White House’s coronavirus task force have been undertaking to respond to the pandemic.
On Monday, Fauci also said on CNN that the Trump campaign should take down the ad, which he called “disappointing” and “completely out of context.”
But the Trump campaign has defended the ad by saying they used Fauci’s “own words.” “The video is from a nationally broadcast television interview in which Dr. Fauci was praising the work of the Trump Administration. The words spoken are accurate, and directly from Dr. Fauci’s mouth,” Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director, said in a statement.
Take a look at the Biden campaign ad here:
Donald Trump is running TV ads taking Dr. Fauci out of context and without his permission.
So, here’s a message from the President in his own words. pic.twitter.com/WCYbIfrQLR
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 12, 2020