Donald Trump and his campaign are apparently so desperate for traction as he continues to absolutely flounder in the polls that they’ve resorted to using “fake” images to prop up their campaign narrative regarding police brutality and protests/riots across the nation — peddling the idea that protesters are somehow worse and more violent than the police.
A new ad from the Trump 2020 campaign features a side by side photo of Donald Trump speaking to police leaders juxtaposed beside a photo that depicts protesters attacking the police with the text “Public safety vs chaos & violence,” captioning the image at the bottom.
What’s the big kicker with this, you may be asking?
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The image on the right that the Trump campaign is attempting to portray as violence against the police in America is not a real image. Or, at least, it’s not a real image of violence against the police in America.
While the photo itself is certainly a real photo, it’s not depicting what the Trump campaign is trying to say it is. In fact, it’s not depicting anything in America at all.
The image on the right side of the Trump campaign ad was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, a public domain archive of photos run by Wikipedia, in 2014, featuring the label, “a police officer attacked by protesters during clashes in Ukraine, Kyiv. Events of February 18, 2014.”
The photographer who captured the image, Mstyslav Chernov, spoke with Business Insider and confirmed the origin of the photograph.
“Photography has always been used to manipulate public opinion. And with the rise of social media and the rise of populism, this is happening even more,” Chernov said. “The only way to combat this is through education and media literacy. When people learn to independently distinguish truth from lies, then the number of manipulations will decrease.”
Former spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign Jesse Lehrich tweeted a screenshot of the new Trump 2020 ad with the caption, “LOL.”
LOL
a new Trump ad warning of chaos & violence depicts a cop being attacked by protesters…
…only it’s a pic from Kyiv in 2014, when Yanukovich’s thugs fought to quash a democratic uprising.https://t.co/VfJujT50Lm pic.twitter.com/QBrlwauo6s
— Jesse Lehrich (@JesseLehrich) July 22, 2020
Donald Trump’s use of overinflated rhetoric regarding the BLM protests is certainly nothing new. Frankly, he’s been inflaming the severity of the situations to fit his own narrative since the protests began on the heels of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s murders.
Trump has then been using his own inflamed narrative to excuse sending the secret police into places like Portland, where protesters are not only being assaulted and tear-gassed, but some seem to actually be being kidnapped.
According to Facebook’s advertising archive, the misleading Trump ad has been run three times since yesterday, each with captions that seemed to be designed to reach America’s evangelical crowd.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
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