The Winning Political Ad that Could Secure Trump’s Election
If Donald Trump wins the presidency again in two weeks, this might be the ad that did it.
It’s a spot called “Nonsense,” and it opens with a line so over-the-top it feels like a parody: “Kamala Supports Taxpayer Funded Sex Changes for Prisoners.”
“And,” the ad continues, for “illegal aliens.”
It’s a grand slam for a Republican ad: left-wing cultural nonsense, waste of taxpayer money, coddling criminals, and illegal immigration — all in one!
I laughed out loud the first time I heard the tagline: “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
‘Radical left liberal’
No mincing words here. But then, you don’t get people to vote for a man like Trump by pulling your punches. Trump’s brand is the guy you might not like or admire, but you know he won’t hold back and he’s never afraid to go there.
People first took it as Trumpian exaggeration when he said on the debate stage, “She did things that nobody would ever think of. Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison. This is a radical left liberal that would do this.”
But Trump’s got the goods, and Harris served it up on a silver platter. In 2019, her first presidential campaign said she’d do exactly that in answer to an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire.
The ad includes a clip of Harris herself at a National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund event pledging “surgery for prisoners — every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access.”
“It’s hard to believe but it’s true. Even the liberal media was shocked,” the ad intones, running through confirmations from CNN, ABC, PBS and The New York Times. Even Politifact grudgingly rated the claim “Mostly True.”
Between the Trump campaign and an outside super PAC, this and similar ads ran over 60,000 times in the first two weeks of October, at a cost of more than $20 million.
The ads have been especially ubiquitous in college and pro football broadcasts and the baseball playoffs — a good way to reach voters (especially men) who don’t consume a ton of political news.
Democratic partisans have cried foul at Trump pressing a culture-war hot button when bigger issues like the economy, national security and the rule of law are at stake.
But that rings hollow when Harris and Tim Walz can’t say three words without talking about abortion, which has been the centerpiece of most Democratic ads this cycle.
Both parties know well that voters judge candidates by their values more than by their platforms, which often don’t survive past Election Day. And cultural issues are easy to understand and hard to conceal behind a mass of statistics and bill details.
In 1988, for example, Michael Dukakis ran on “competence, not ideology,” but George H.W. Bush focused on the Pledge of Allegiance and prison furloughs for violent criminals.
It’s not just a slogan
Between that and Dukakis giving a cold-fish answer when asked if he’d rethink the death penalty if his wife was raped, voters concluded that they didn’t care if Dukakis was competent or not — they didn’t like his values.
Moreover, we live in an age when woke politics is often a distraction from the government doing its jobs: safe streets, secure borders, kids taught to read.
The ad’s closing graphic suggests that Trump has better priorities than this madness: “Trump: Lower Taxes, Bigger Paychecks for Workers.”
As elections analyst Dave Wasserman notes, the ad “plays into those undecided voters’ fear that Harris is too liberal.” Some versions of the ad label her “Crazy liberal Kamala.”
A proposal like this shows voters that this isn’t just a slogan. It’s who she is.
