The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group led by George Conway, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who is a frequent Trump critic and married to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, has released an ad criticizing President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The 60-second ad titled “Mourning in America” plays off former President Reagan’s 1984 ad titled “Morning in America,” which the Lincoln Project said highlighted the “positive impact” under Reagan’s first term in the White House.
The Lincoln Project’s ad instead paints a more pessimistic picture of the state of the country nearing the end of Trump’s first term.
“There’s mourning in America,” the narrator of the ad says. “Today more than 60,000 Americans have died from a deadly virus Donald Trump ignored. With the economy in shambles more than 26 million Americans are out of work, the worst economies in decades.”
The narrator continues, saying the country is “weaker and sicker and poorer” under Trump’s leadership.
“And now Americans are asking, ‘If we have another year like this, will there even be an America?’” the narrator says.
Sarah Matthews, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, on Monday defended the president’s response to the pandemic.
“President Trump took early, decisive, and unprecedented action to combat the coronavirus. Let’s not forget Rick Wilson, a Lincoln Project advisor, tweeted that he hoped the First Lady would ‘be infected’ with coronavirus,” Matthews said in a statement to The Hill.
Wilson, a GOP strategist and advisor to the Lincoln Project, tweeted “#BeInfected” in March in response to a CNN report that the first lady was planning to air a PSA on the coronavirus.
“The American people know President Trump is working hard for them and see that his administration is doing everything in its power to protect their safety and safeguard the economy,” Matthews added.
Trump’s reelection campaign released its own ad Sunday night, airing first on Fox News ahead of Trump’s town hall, touting the president’s response to the pandemic.
The virus has infected more than 1 million people and killed 67,913 in the U.S., according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.