Watch Donald Trump's first TV campaign ad which captures his xenophobia and shows Morocco as Mexico
The Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination has released an ad showcasing his loathing for Muslim and Mexican immigrants.
It's not as though Donald Trump has been starved off television exposure.
Still, the Republican frontrunner in the 2016 US presidential elections has just released his first television ad.
"I am Donald Trump and I approve this message," begins the commercial from the Trump campaign. Most of the 30 seconds are used to explain that Trump will keep Muslims from entering the US, even if temporarily.
Juxtaposing pictures of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with those of the San Bernardino shooters, the voice-over tells us, "The politicians can pretend it's something else, but Donald Trump calls it 'Radical Islamic Terrorism'."
The other ingredient in Trump's recipe for making "...America great again": a wall on the Mexican border, which Mexico will be made to pay for.
Turning incoming Mexicans into a threat, supposedly like incoming Muslims (who are equated with ISIS), is all par for the course for Trump's campaign. The presidential aspirant has declared that Mexicans are rapists, as he pointed out in his speech announcing his candidacy. He later enlarged the geographical source rapists come from to include all of Latin America.
Curiously, taking oil from ISIS finds mention in this short ad. The New Yorker reports, "In the past, he has suggested that this oil, or maybe Iraqi oil, or oil belonging to someone else in the general region, should be taken as a sort of war booty and used to pay for the care of wounded American servicemen.... He knows, better than most politicians, how to play to a belief held by many Americans (not without reason) that the whole Iraq adventure was a fraud perpetrated on the American people, who paid for it with lives and tax money and got nothing back, not even gratitude. In that sense, the oil-grab idea, which can sound like a throwaway line when Trump uses it at rallies, captures both the ugliness of his campaign and his populist instincts."
The footage of Mexico shown in the advertisement is actually Morocco, a news website Politifact pointed out soon after the ad was released. The footage was traced back to an Italian TV network, Repubblica TV. "According to the description posted by the network (and using Google Translate) the video was released by the Interior Ministry in Madrid, showing an 'onslaught of hundreds of migrants to the wall that separates the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco,' the website reported.
The Trump campaign issued a clarification which was published by Politifact. It says that it's okay to show misleading footage:
"The use of this footage was intentional and selected to demonstrate the severe impact of an open border and the very real threat Americans face if we do not immediately build a wall and stop illegal immigration. The biased mainstream media doesn't understand, but Americans who want to protect their jobs and families do", it read.
Appearing on a news show, Trump called the matter of incorrect footage "irrelevant", adding that it's "really merely a display of what a dumping ground is going to look like and that's what our country is becoming." Watch the video below from the 1:35 mark to 2:20, where he explains this:
The commercial is meant to be aired in Iowa and New Hampshire, the two states where there is a good chance that Trump will win.