The Trump campaign plans to spend $4.8 million to air this ad – and others – over the next 10 days in crucial battleground states Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida, The Wrap reports. The next 80 days are going to be fiercely contested between the candidates and our current state of play shows Clinton holding a significant electoral advantage heading in to that intense fall campaign. It tries to contrast an America with Hillary Clinton in charge with that of Donald Trump.
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“In Hillary Clinton’s America, the system stays rigged against Americans”, the ad’s narrator says. “Syrian refugees flood in”. Also undocumented immigrants typically use unauthorized Social Security numbers to work, so they pay into the system, but can’t receive benefits, though it is possible to access benefits if they eventually attain legal status.
But if it will last is very much an open question. That’s all replaced by bright color images in Donald Trump’s America, with shots of the border being tightly patrolled by helicopter. Jaylani Hussein, director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, criticized Trump for “anti-Muslim and anti-Somali rhetoric”. As border patrol helicopters and trucks swarm across the desert, the narrator assures, “Terrorists and risky criminals kept out”. The border: secured. Our families: safe.
Yet Trump has struggled badly in recent weeks to offer voters a consistent message, overshadowing formal policy speeches with a steady stream of self-created controversies, including a public feud with an American Muslim family whose son was killed while serving in the USA military in Iraq.
Trump told a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, Thursday night: “Sometimes in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing”.
Trump also made a last-minute scheduling change, scrapping a planned event in NY in order to travel with his running mate Mike Pence to tour the flood damage in Louisiana on Friday morning. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, says he won’t be involved in Trump’s visit. NBC’s Mark Murray tabulated how Trump’s buys in battleground states compares to those of Hillary Clinton.
“Donald Trump’s America is secure, terrorists and risky criminals kept out”, the narrator says. He also started to shift his tone a bit, expressing general regret for some of the things he has said during this heated campaign. In his speech announcing his run past year, he said that immigrants coming to the USA illegally from Mexico were bringing drugs and were rapists, and some, he assumed, “were good people”.
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His attempt to make amends with voters he has offended during the 2016 race and his increasing reliance on prepared remarks suggest that his campaign is trying to keep the free-wheeling candidate on track. In the past two months alone, Clinton is said to have spent $61 million on general election ads, with pro-Clinton groups spending another $43 million.
