“What would be amazing instead of the Post finding every negative issue relating to President Trump they would describe the successes of his presidency… energy independence, protected borders, soaring employment, decreasing unemployment, miniscule inflation, low gas prices, fair and honest tariffs, no wars, no banking problems, 401K’s growing rapidly and on and on. Is there a journalist on the Post staff that has the courage to cover Trump in a fair and balanced way? Probably not”
– The current top comment on the New York Post article “Trump campaign attack ad uses stock images from Ukraine to depict Americans suffering under Biden,” posted Thursday.
The article correctly points out that two of the B-rolls used in the Trump 2024 campaign’s “Mourning in America” ad – a title stolen from a 2020 Lincoln Project spot ripping Trump’s failure to manage the COVID-19 pandemic – were stock footage filmed by Ukrainian production crews, the first being a 2021 clip of a couple balking at the price of a home and walking out on the real estate agent, used to depict rising housing costs, which was generic enough. The second shows a hipster-ish man staring at a tablet in dismay as he sits on a beanbag chair in a sparse cellar while the narrator decries younger Americans being “forced to live in their parents’ basement,” a clip whose producers told the Post was actually filmed to depict Ukrainians sheltering underground from Russian bombardment.
The second one is certainly a bit more embarrassing for Trump’s campaign given his record of willingness to undermine Ukraine’s defenses against Russian aggression. Still, as far as right wing misrepresentations of imagery – intentional or otherwise – used in their propaganda goes, this is pretty low on the scale compared to Ted Cruz using a pic of a statue of Mother Russia on the cover of his stupid book, Fox News using a photo of a ransacked Japanese supermarket after the 2011 earthquake to attack “Empty Shelves Joe” in 2022, and when the Trump 2020 campaign used pics of Russian fighter jets in a “support our troops” ad. Just last week the Trump 2024 campaign put out a Facebook ad using pics from 2020 to sell “A Nation in Decline” under Biden… probably something the Post’s readers would be far more upset with the paper for covering “in a fair and balanced way.”