Democratic super PAC launches ad targeting Trump’s ‘alternative facts’ on coronavirus

A Democratic super PAC is targeting President Trump’s response to the coronavirus in a new ad.

The nearly 2-minute-long digital ad, shared exclusively with The Hill on Thursday, slams some of Trump’s comments about the pandemic, characterizing his remarks as “alternative facts.”

The ad uses a split screen to juxtapose Trump’s comments with those made by the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci.

“Donald Trump thinks he knows more than America’s top doctors and scientists,” text from the ad reads at the start. The ad then goes on to play Trump’s clips under the heading “alternative facts,” with Fauci’s labeled “facts.”

The ad was released by Win the West, a super PAC focused on helping presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden beat Trump in November.

“The American people deserve nothing less than the truth and the facts from their President. President Trump fails these basic tasks nearly every day. That’s why the stakes for our country and the 2020 election could not be higher,” Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a supporter of the super PAC, said in a statement Thursday.

“We need a president who tells the truth, believes in science, listens to public health experts, and who will always put the American people over himself. That candidate is Joe Biden,” Gallego added.

The Arizona Democrat said the ad lays out the latest examples of what has become a “presidency fueled by alternative facts.”

In one of the ad’s clips, taken from a March 27 briefing at the White House, Trump describes the deadly coronavirus by saying, “You can call it a germ, you can call it a flu, you can call it a virus, you can call it many different names. I’m not sure anybody really knows what it is.”

The ad then flips to Fauci saying the previous day that the coronavirus is “very, very much more transmissible than flu and more importantly it’s significantly more serious.”

Approval for Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has dropped recently, according to an ABC News-Ipsos poll released last week that found 47 percent of respondents said they approved of Trump’s response, compared with 52 percent who disapproved.

In a similar ABC-Ipsos survey released the previous week, 55 percent said they approved of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, with 43 percent saying they didn’t.

More than 430,000 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in the U.S., leading to almost 15,000 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.