Inside a Harris Ad in Which Ex-Trump Aides Blast Him as Unfit for Office

An attack ad from Kamala Harris’s campaign uses denunciations of Donald Trump by his own former top security lieutenants to portray him as too risky to restore to power.

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Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has spent more than $2.6 million running this 60-second ad across the country since Oct. 3, including six-figure buys in six of the seven battleground states, according to AdImpact.

Here’s a look at the ad, its accuracy and its major takeaway.

On the Screen

The ad opens with ominous music and a shaky-camera-style montage of scenes from former President Donald J. Trump’s past. He is seen standing outside the New York City courtroom where this year he was found to have committed civil fraud.

A timeline scrolls back to images of Mr. Trump as a candidate for president in 2016, and then a photo shows him in the Situation Room in 2019 — on the day that U.S. soldiers raided an ISIS leader’s compound in Syria — flanked by three top officials at the time: Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Over that image, a white-lettered warning materializes: “Trump is not fit to be president again.”

The ad goes on to toggle between photos of Mr. Trump alongside those men, as well as his former national security adviser, John R. Bolton, while they served together, and clips of the four former officials in recent television interviews delivering scathing criticism of Mr. Trump and dire warnings about the risks if he is elected to another term.

Subtitles drive those messages home. “I CANNOT in good conscience ENDORSE DONALD TRUMP this year,” Mr. Pence is seen saying on the CBS show “Face the Nation.” “The only thing he cares about IS DONALD TRUMP,” Mr. Bolton says on CNN.

Credit…Harris for President

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