A full week after the political attack ad “Mourning in America” was released by an anti-Trump Republican group, the boiling-hot fury coming from the president has eased to a simmer — but it’s far from the back burner.
The 1-minute ad’s title is a play on Ronald Reagan’s successful campaign commercial of 36 years ago, “Morning in America” — but its aim is the reverse: instead of building up a GOP candidate, it seeks to bring down a Republican incumbent.
And the incumbent, Donald Trump, is still seething, egged on by Sunday’s Washington Post opinion piece by George Conway, a traditional GOP conservative and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, which is dedicated to preventing Trump’s re-election.
“Americans died from covid-19 at the rate of about one every 42 seconds during the past month,” Conway wrote Sunday. “That ought to keep any president awake at night.”
But, he added: “Not Donald Trump.”
“Trump’s narcissism deadens any ability he might otherwise have had to carry out the duties of a president in the manner the Constitution requires. He’s so self-obsessed, he can only act for himself, not for the nation,” Conway wrote. “It’s why he was impeached, and why he should have been removed from office”
“Mourning in America” focuses on Trump’s slow, inept handling of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic (which has now killed nearly 80,000 Americans, according to Johns Hopkins University) and the resulting economic disaster, with U.S. unemployment now at Great Depression levels.
It aired first on television on a channel certain to capture Trump’s attention: Fox News. It cost just $10,000 to produce and the Lincoln Project paid Fox $5,000 to run it, a trivial amount by network standards.
It has since generated millions of dollars in donations to the Lincoln Project: and those donations are helping buy time for the ad on TV stations in the swing states of Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida. The group plans more ads, the Post says.
Conway is also famously married to Trump’s personal cheerleader and White House news spinner, Kellyanne Conway; if there is pillow-talk in the Conway bedroom, it must be something to hear.
“Many are giving up hope,” the ad says. “Millions worry that a loved one won’t survive Covid-19. There’s mourning in America — and under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is weaker, sicker, and poorer.”
The ad concludes by asking: if Trump wins another four years, “will there even be an America” left?
Last Tuesday, after the ad appeared for the first time, Trump followed his own well-known script by firing a barrage of angry overnight tweets, denouncing and insulting the Lincoln Project’s Republican members.
“In a four-tweet screed,” Conway wrote Sunday, “he attacked me and my colleagues at the Lincoln Project as ‘LOSERS,’ ‘loser types,’ ‘crazed” and ‘a disgrace to Honest Abe.’”
Conway continued: “About me, he said, ‘I don’t know what Kellyanne did to her deranged loser of a husband, Moonface, but it must have been really bad.’ Ten hours later, on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, Trump was still enraged, ranting about us for nearly two minutes in front of the media.”
“We were trying to reach one person. It was $5,000 well spent,” said John Weaver, a Lincoln Project co-founder who worked for then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s 2016 presidential campaign and Sen. John McCain’s campaigns in 2000 and 2008.
“The ad was great. It spoke the truth,” Weaver told the Post. “But sometimes, you have to be lucky, too.”
And they were lucky, provoking the volatile president in a way few opponents ever have.
“Because he fears being revealed as a fake or deranged, he’ll call others fake or deranged. Because he fears losing, he’ll call them losers instead,” Conway wrote Sunday.
“And while Trump’s mind roils in rage, too many Americans are losing their lives. That’s the losing that matters, to everyone but him.”
