As the Democratic Party keeps trying to spin its way out of President Biden’s Atlanta debate disaster last week, it turned to Georgia’s largest newspaper Tuesday in a fresh bid to turn the 2024 campaign into a referendum on Donald Trump.
In what the Democratic National Committee called a “homepage takeover of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,” readers were hammered with a digital ad describing Trump, in the Democrats’ words, as “not only a fraud and a liar, but as the ultimate threat to our democracy.”
That 85-second spot revisits familiar tropes from the Biden-Harris re-election campaign’s messaging – and avoids any mention or depiction of the president himself, suggesting that the ad could be deployed regardless of whether there is a change atop the ticket.
The ad spotlights an exchange between Trump and CNN debate co-moderator Dana Bash, who asked: “Will you accept the results of the election regardless of who wins? Yes or no, please?”
“If it’s a fair and legal and good election – absolutely,” Trump responded, before repeating his claim that the 2020 election was marked by “fraud and everything else.”
“If you want, we’ll have a news conference on it in a week or we’ll have another one of these on – in a week,” Trump added.
The DNC ad says the exchange is proof of Trump having “refused” to accept election results and includes a clip of CNN anchor Kasie Hunt saying the 78-year-old “would not commit to accepting the election results.”
“He lied over and over again,” Hunt says in the ad, which also includes commentary from liberal MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Mika Brezezinski and former Barack Obama campaign strategist-turned-CNN commentator David Axelrod.
“Donald Trump is the most existential threat to America’s democracy yet,” DNC spokesperson Abhi Rahman said. “Trump has shown over and over again that he has no remorse for his role in the insurrection on our nation’s Capitol, and now that the Supreme Court has emboldened his dangerous pursuit of power, there’s no doubt that his number one priority in a second term would be dismantling democracy as we know it.”
Prior to last week’s debate, Trump led Biden by five percentage points, 43% to 38% in a poll conducted by the AJC.