This brutal new ad portrays Donald Trump as a full-blown sociopathBy Greg Sargent
One of the assumptions guiding top Democrats as they prepare to face Donald Trump is this: While Trump’s media ubiquity has rendered him highly visible and well known to the American people in a general sense, many voters are not acquainted with the full range of all the specific things he’s said and done, in all their wretched and depraved glory.
With the news dominated by reports that Hillary Clinton is now the presumptive nominee, based on an Associated Press tally of anonymous super-delegates, her Super PAC, Priorities USA, has unleashed a new wave of advertising in swing states that is focused solely on Trump’s belittling of a disabled reporter
The ad is running in seven swing states — Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Iowa — and it’s backed by a $4 million buy for its first week, as part of a broader $20 million buy between now and the conventions.
Note that this ad doesn’t merely show footage of Trump mocking the reporter. It shows a family with a disabled daughter discussing how hurt and shocked they were to see him abusing someone with a similar disability.
The spot is another sign that Democrats think they can render Trump unacceptably toxic before a general election audience by relentlessly spotlighting his profound cruelty — as displayed by Trump himself. This strain runs through much of the evolving Democratic critique of Trump and, more broadly, of Trumpism. In one early tell, the Clinton campaign released a web video recapping footage of Trump calling for mass deportations and a ban on Muslims, and linking those to his vow to revive torture and take out terrorists’ families. More recently, Elizabeth Warren’s big speech pillorying Trump focused hard on his suggestion that he relished making a profit off a housing crash, but crucially, she argued that his own quotes revealed his cruel, cavalier attitude towards the millions of people who would be badly hurt by it.
And in Clinton’s own recent speech, she repeatedly hit Trump as dangerously unfit for the presidency, due to his lack of experience and dangerously incoherent ideas, but she went much further, essentially portraying him as a full blown sociopath. Dems are also circulating new reports that Trump privately urged his surrogates to keep up the bigoted attacks on Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s Mexican-American heritage, and to keep arguing that he is unfit to preside over a case involving Trump, given his pledge to carry out mass deportations. Not to put too fine a point on it, but arguing that Mexican-Americans might be hostile towards Trump because he wants to carry out the forced removal of millions of illegal immigrants is how Trump is defending himself.
As I’ve argued, the strategic imperative against Trump is similar to the one Dems faced with Mitt Romney, but with a crucial difference. In 2012, voters seemed inclined to grant Romney the presumption of technocratic ability on the economy. Similarly, some polls now show Trump with an advantage on the economy over Clinton. Then, as now, Dems need to drive home to voters that, whatever economic know-how the GOP nominee possesses, he is not actually on their side. In 2012, they painted Romney as an aloof, plutocratic symbol of the cruelties of outsourcing and globalization. In the case of Trump, their focus is increasingly on Trump’s personal cruelty — not just in business, but also from the perch of his newfound media dominance. The calculation is that once general election voters are fully exposed to Trump’s seeming delight in marginalizing and abusing people — individuals and groups alike — they’ll find it horrifying. His cruel derangement will render him unelectable.
