President Donald Trump’s campaign is ratcheting up lawsuits as the election nears — they’ve already sued CNN for a piece about Trump’s ties to Russia — and now the president’s campaign is suing a Biden-aligned Super PAC over an ad showing Trump calling the coronavirus a “hoax.”
The 30-second-clips from Priorities USA (an ad titled ‘Exponential Threat’ or ‘One Week Later’) opens to Trump’s voice saying “the coronavirus, this is their new hoax. We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.”
Text matching his remarks flashes on the screen beside a chart tracking the rise of the virus as the president’s voice declares “when you have fifteen people and within a couple of days, it’s going to down to zero. We really think we’ve done a great job in keeping it down to a minimum.”
The ad closes with a shot of Trump in front of the White House saying “no, I don’t take responsibility at all.”
The Trump campaign sued the Super PAC in a Wisconsin court last week, arguing in their complaint that the ad contains “a false and defamatory statement about the Trump Campaign.” They took particular issue with the quote in which Trump says “this is their new hoax.”
The nonpartisan political fact-checking website, FactCheck.org, wrote that, “The Democratic super PAC Priorities USA Action has been running an ad falsely suggesting President Donald Trump called the coronavirus outbreak a ‘hoax.'”
However, FactCheck noted that the “overwhelming bulk of the ad is on target. But the beginning is deceptive.”
The president’s campaign claims that Priorities USA “knowingly and intentionally misattributed the Manufactured Statement to candidate Trump – a statement that PUSA knew that candidate Trump never said.”
The campaign further argued that “a reasonable viewer or listener hearing or seeing the PUSA ads would hear and/or see that the candidate Trump said, as a sentence: ‘The coronavirus, this is their new hoax.'”
