Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday released his first television commercial in the 2016 race for the White House with a 30-second spot highlighting his stance on Muslims, immigration and terrorism. Rather than straying away from his most controversial statements, Trump’s ad celebrates them.
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Trump has previously run radio ads and will launch a new one this week featuring Kathryn Gates-Skipper, the first female Marine to serve in combat operations, his campaign said.
“He’ll quickly cut the head off ISIS and take their oil”, the narrator said of Trump.
He also repeats an earlier campaign promise to build a wall along the southern border “that Mexico will pay for”. The spot will only air in Iowa and New Hampshire as part of a series of advertisements in the month before the Iowa caucus.
Trump told the Washington Post that he hopes that the ad, and others in production, can sway undecided voters. “The world is laughing at us, at our stupidity”, he told the paper.
According to a statement to NBC News from Trump’s campaign, the ad will begin airing in Iowa and New Hampshire Tuesday with the campaign spending approximately $2 million per week on the ads.
Titled “Great Again”, the ad opens with an image of President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, followed by photos of San Bernardino, California, terrorists Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik while a narrator darkly intones, “The politicians can pretend it’s something else, but Donald Trump calls it radical Islamic terrorism”. Trump also said he will be paying for the ads out of his own pocket.
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He said he recalled thinking, “I’m Dollars 35 million to USD 40 million under budget, and to be honest, I don’t think I need (ads) because I have such a big lead”.
