How bad was 2020? Bad enough that former President Donald Trump is using photos from that year in a new 2024 attack ad against successor Joe Biden ― even though Trump was still in office at the time.
Last week, the Trump team launched a campaign on Facebook that implies the country is worse off now than when he occupied the White House.
The ad — which reads, “Under Joe Biden, America is a nation in decline” — includes photos of a burning police car and a group of migrants.
But, according to Forbes contributor Matt Novak, those pictures were actually taken in 2020.
The photo of the police car was from a Chicago protest on May 30 of that year, and it was published in multiple news outlets at the time.
Novak further noted that the image of migrants is an Associated Press pic from January 2020. Though the ad appears to suggest that the people are entering the U.S., the photo actually shows them moving between Mexico and Guatemala.
“Liberals and Democrats wish to burn American cities down, and allow criminals and drugs to cross the border,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told JS about the ad. “This is the America they want.”
When asked directly about the use of photos from Trump’s tenure rather than Biden’s, Cheung did not immediately respond.
It’s no secret that Trump lies a lot, and it’s probably no surprise that his presidential campaigns have a sketchy history with ads.
In April 2020, his team was accused of employing racist dog whistles in an image purportedly showing MS-13 gang members. That September, the campaign was criticized for manipulating a Biden photo to make him look older than he was.
And in December of that year, Trump was mocked for posting a campaign ad more than seven weeks after losing his reelection bid.