HuffPost titles the article about this ad being aired on Fox News shows including his favorite, Fox and Friends, as follows:
A Republican group opposed to President Donald Trump is urging voters to end his “American carnage” by voting him out of office in November. And it’s using one of Trump’s favorite TV shows to spread the message.
The video was produced by a group called Republican Voters Against Trump (website). Conservative commentator Bill Kristol was the founder of the group. Back in February Kristol wrote an untitled piece in The Bulwark which began with a powerful Longfellow poem:
Excerpt:
February was the lost month to deal with the virus. April, we hope, will be the virus’s cruelest month. But February was the incubation period, the period of presidential misinformation and maladministration that made the disaster of March and April—and everything after—possible.
February also marked the Senate’s vote to acquit President Trump, without having heard witnesses, of the charges of impeachment brought by the House. That vote marked the culmination of the acquiescence—nay, the subservience—of the Republican party to Trump. The party which had aspired to the examples of Lincoln and Reagan willingly made itself a mere personal possession of Donald Trump.
And the conservative movement? Having long since bent the knee to Trump, it fell into full prostration. The movement which under Bill Buckley had been mostly—not entirely, but mostly—a force for liberty and against populist demagoguery, consummated its embrace of demagogic and authoritarian populism.
This is the Republican Voters Against Trump website.
My reaction to the video was that the people who see this on Fox will tune out or totally reverse the meaning of the images meant to portray Trump as dangerously incompetent. For example those images of people hospitalized with Covid-19 will simply buy into Trump’s claim it was all China’s fault and he was the hero who saved millions of lives.
They will see and approve of clips of him saying “when the looting starts the shooting starts” and his message to police “when you put somebody in the car please don’t be too nice.” When he says “this American carnage stops right here and right now” their interpretation will be that the carnage was what he talked about after he rode down the escalator to begin his campaign. Warning: This 3 ½ minute video is difficult to watch.
When do we beat Mexico at the border? They're laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they're killing us economically.
The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems.
Thank you. It's true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people.
What they will hear as the American carnage Trump saved them from is this from Sept. 2018 when he was already president:
President Trump used extraordinarily harsh rhetoric to renew his call for stronger immigration laws Wednesday, calling undocumented immigrants "animals" and venting frustration at Mexican officials who he said "do nothing" to help the United States.
“We have people coming into the country or trying to come in, we're stopping a lot of them, but we're taking people out of the country. You wouldn't believe how bad these people are," Trump said.
"These aren't people. These are animals.” USA Today
I think it is a fair characterization to say that many, perhaps the majority, of Trump’s most ardent and vociferous supporters consider these people “animals” (I’m sure like you, I hate that the word animal is used this way) who should at best be put in cages, or sent back to countries where their lives would be in jeopardy, or at worst be gunned down like rapid dogs.
What do you think about the power of this ad to enlighten Fox News viewers? Please comment and take the poll.
Saturday, Jun 6, 2020 · 4:30:29 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
Another aspect of running such ads on Fox which I hadn't thought of until now is how infuriated they make Trump. The angrier he gets the more likely he is to erupt in rage, and thus he is apt to do stupid self-defeating things. He is used to the sycophancy of his Fox toadies and when there’s a commercial break and he sees an ad like this interrupt the fawning over how great he is I think it both gets him angry and has a detumescent effect.