washington
CNN
—
A new TV ad from former President Donald Trump’s campaign removed keywords from two separate quotes to deceptively attack Vice President Kamala Harris.
The ad, which President Trump also posted on social media Wednesday, targets Harris over her tax policy. Three elements of the 30 second spot are invalid. Two edited quotes and a key statistic that is inaccurately described in the ad.
The ad shows two video clips of Harris saying, “Taxes have to go up.” Also, those words will appear on the screen in large text in all caps.
However, the ad cuts out critical language from Harris’ actual comments. During her last presidential campaign, in 2019, she said those words: “Inheritance taxes for the wealthiest Americans must go up.”
By removing the words “real estate” and “for the wealthiest Americans,” the ad significantly changes the meaning of Harris.
Here is Harris’ full statement from 2019: You can watch it around the 15 minute mark in this video. A tax increase for the top 1% is also necessary. And some of that is going to be about repealing the tax bill that they just passed. And we’re also looking at having to raise inheritance taxes on the wealthiest Americans. and closing loopholes for certain businesses, including the carried interest deduction and many other things around people not reporting their income as income and therefore not being taxed as income the way you and I are. It is to do. ”
The Trump campaign declined to comment on the edit.
The ad uses keywords compiled from New York Times articles.
Additional on-screen text in the ad quotes the New York Times: “Harris wants big tax hikes.” This quote is from an article dated August 22nd.
But as the Times itself pointed out on Thursday, this is also a misleading edit. What the Aug. 22 article actually said was, “Harris wants big tax increases on America’s wealthiest citizens and big corporations.”
The Trump campaign declined to comment on the edit.
Also, for obvious reasons, the ad says that under Harris’ plan, “people making less than $400,000 a year won’t see their taxes go up,” even though the sentence preceding the Times article says: It’s also worth noting that it’s not mentioned.
The ad cites the Tax Foundation, a right-wing think tank, as support for the narrator’s claim that “Kamala’s plan would raise taxes for families by nearly $2,600 a year.” The on-screen text uses an impressively specific number of $2,580, which it attributes to a May 7 Tax Foundation analysis.
But when CNN asked Erica York, senior economist and research director at the Tax Foundation, about the numbers on Thursday, she replied: We estimated how taxes would increase if the 2017 tax cuts were allowed to expire, but that’s not the number they use, nor is it our estimate for Harris’ tax proposal. ”
In fact, the Tax Foundation’s May 7 analysis co-authored by York was not about Harris’ various tax proposals. Rather, it considered what would happen if President Trump’s 2017 personal tax cuts were allowed to expire at the end of 2025 as scheduled, rather than being extended by Congress and the next president. Still, the $2,580 figure was not included.
So we asked the Trump campaign to explain the $2,580 statistic. The campaign offered an explanation, but it wasn’t a good explanation.
Campaign spokesman Alex Pfeiffer said the campaign will follow the Tax Foundation’s May 7 release on how much taxes would increase on average in each state in 2026 if President Trump’s individual tax cuts are allowed to expire. He said the campaign then calculated the average for those states. Averages are taken to arrive at a figure for the impact of ‘Kamala’s Plan’.
There’s a big problem here.
First and foremost, it is clearly wrong to cite the Tax Foundation’s analysis as if it were an analysis of “Kamala’s plan.” Mr. Harris developed a number of unique tax proposals that the Tax Foundation did not consider in this analysis.
Second, it is unclear whether Ms. Harris actually wants all of Mr. Trump’s personal tax cuts to expire. As the Times article noted, during her current campaign, she promised not to raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year. Pfeiffer noted that Harris, who in 2019 called for a complete repeal of President Trump’s law known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, is no longer making such a call, but York On Thursday, Harris said she had “not specified” how she would deal with the expiring bill. According to the provision, she “may continue the TCJA for people with incomes of less than $400,000.”
Third, the Trump campaign’s calculations will be crude, even if they label their calculations accurately. You cannot calculate a useful number for “family” by simply averaging the averages for each state. This averaging method treats Wyoming, which has a population of well under 1 million, as being mathematically equivalent to, say, Pennsylvania, which has a population of about 13 million.
But in an ad as slippery as this, the character’s flaws pale in comparison to the deceptiveness of its construction and the deceptiveness of its excerpts.
