Spiraling out of control

It was an egregious lie, a willful political falsehood.

The pro-Trump SuperPAC “Committee to Defend the President” purchased ads on the local CBS affiliates in South Carolina prior to the Democratic debate in Charleston, that began with “Joe Biden promised to help our community. It was a lie. Here’s President Obama…”

The ad then continues to play an audio passage from Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” to allude that Biden supports “plantation politics” and describes how the African-American community had been wrongfully treated while simultaneously flashing headlines across the screen that knocked Biden’s history on race. It then concludes, “Enough. Joe Biden won’t represent us, defend us, or help us. Don’t believe Biden’s empty promises.”

To say the passage was taken out of context is an understatement. The audio was then-Senator Obama reciting a quote from a barber about Chicago’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington, where the man says, “Plantation politics. Black people in the worst jobs. The worst housing. Police brutality rampant. But when the so-called Black committeemen came around election time, we’d all line up and vote the straight Democratic ticket. Sell our souls for a Christmas turkey.”

It had literally nothing to do with Joe Biden, before or since. Obama spokeswoman Katie Hill issued a statement, noting, “[T]his despicable ad is straight out of the Republican disinformation playbook, and it’s clearly designed to suppress turnout among minority voters by taking President Obama’s voice out of context and twisting his words to mislead viewers…In the interest of truth in advertising, we are calling on TV stations to take this ad down and stop playing into the hands of bad actors who seek to sow division and confusion among the electorate.”

The former president’s lawyers sent the PAC a cease-and-desist letter; though, it may not be the last time outright lies are employed this year. Trump’s allies simply attempted to use a blatant falsehood to swing African-American voters away from the former vice president in a Democratic primary to another candidate who polls better against the current incumbent in the November general election.

Manipulating the facts to damage an opponent is hardly a new tactic, yet using another person’s words in a completely untrue fashion, attributing a criticism of Chicago local politics as that individual’s attitude towards his own handpicked VP, crosses a dangerous line. These commercials display a cynical disregard for any standard of political morality.

The audacity of these “hopeless” lies stand as a metric on how much Donald Trump has corrupted American culture and society—his minions removing even truth from political discussion. The silence of GOP establishment to these new lows proved deafening. Other than Mitt Romney, the idea of an elected Republican standing up to Trump’s false narrative has become a joke.

This article originally published in the March 2, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.