Imagine I saw a movie and you asked whether I enjoyed it or not. I replied, “I wish I could say that I liked this movie, but the truth is that it was simply unwatchable and should be avoided at all costs.”
Then imagine some public relations official working for the studio took what I said and put it in an ad. The commercial quoted me as saying, “I liked this movie.”
Did I literally use those four words in that order? Sure, but the context matters. In this little hypothetical, removing the phrase from the larger sentence turned reality on its head and left the public with the wrong impression.
This is a subject Donald Trump’s campaign knows all about.
In late September, for example, CBS News published a report on Vice President Kamala Harris and part of her vision for post-election immigration policy. The headline on the piece read: “Harris vows to keep Biden’s border crackdown: ‘The United States is a sovereign nation.’”
A month later, the Republican former president’s campaign released a television ad that quotes the headline — or more accurately, part of the headline. The on-screen text read: “Harris vows to keep Biden’s border.”
Did the original headline use those six words in that order? Yes. Did the Trump campaign remove the relevant context? Obviously.
Earlier, in the same commercial, the Republican campaign highlighted a report from The New York Times that said, “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes.” The original report in the newspaper actually said, “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.”
In other words, Trump’s team took a popular policy position, removed the relevant portion that provided the necessary context, and brought it to the public in a deceptive way.
And then, in the exact same ad, they did it again.
To be sure, to know anything about the former president is to know that he lies uncontrollably, about matters large and small, to the point that members of his own team have questioned his ability to tell the difference between reality and fantasy.
But what’s not as widely appreciated is the fact that Trump’s campaign ads aren’t much better than his campaign speeches when it comes to telling the truth.
As CNN’s Daniel Dale summarized in a report last week, “Former President Donald Trump’s late-campaign television ads are littered with deceptively edited and misleadingly described quotations.”
The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler has similarly highlighted a series of recent ads from the former president that wildly mislead the public.
Of course, the question that should linger in the minds of voters is simple: If Harris were as awful as Trump claims, why can’t his campaign ads tell the truth?