A super-PAC supporting Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton is out with a new ad that exorciates Donald Trump for mocking a disabled reporter last year.
It’s the first ad in a $20 million buy that will run from Wednesday through the summer in the swing states of Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Nevada, Colorado, Iowa and New Hampshire.
The ad rehashes comments and gestures Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, made on the trail in November, when he mimicked a reporter while making sudden body motions. Critics charged Trump with making light of the reporter’s joint disorder.
The ad uses the parents of a disabled child to criticize Trump’s behavior.
“When I saw Donald Trump mock a disabled person, I was just shocked,” says Lauren Glaros, an Ohio mother whose daughter, Grace, has a spinal disability. Immediately after her comment, the ad shows news footage of Trump making the gestures, before a brief explanation of the reporter’s disability.
“The children at Grace’s school all know never to mock her and so for an adult to mock someone with a disability is shocking.”
Grace’s father, Chris, follows up with another barb.
“When I saw Donald Trump mock somebody with a disability, it showed me his soul, it showed me his heart. And I didn’t like what I saw,” he adds.
The controversy stems from Trump’s comments about Serge Kovaleski, a reporter whose story about the 9/11 attacks Trump had pointed to as proof of his assertion that “thousands” of Muslims cheered the attacks.
Kovaleski had written that police had looked into allegations that people were cheering but did not say how many or provide the result of that investigation.
That prompted Trump’s tirade criticizing the reporter.
Trump denied he was targeting Kovaelski’s specific disability. He also said he had never met the reporter despite Kovaleski’s insistence that they had been on a first name basis while he covered Trump for The New York Daily News.