Biden Ad in Battleground States Draws Attention to Trump's NATO Threat
The Biden campaign is releasing a digital ad in three battleground states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — with significant populations of Americans with Eastern European roots, attacking former President Donald J. Trump's recent threat to NATO countries.
The minute long advertisement highlights Mr Trump's claim that when he was president he told the leaders of NATO countries that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever they want” against countries that breach their financial obligations to the military alliance had not been fulfilled. (Trump has long portrayed NATO as some kind of protection racket, distorting the facts of an unofficial commitment to member states to increase their military spending.)
“No president has ever said anything like that,” says the ad's deep-voiced narrator.
The spot will run during the Super Tuesday primaries on March 5 and will target voters in three states crucial to Biden's re-election chances. Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are “home to more than 2.5 million Americans who identify as Polish, Finnish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian – all NATO countries bordering Russia and facing the threat of enlargement of Putin's aggression in Ukraine,” the newspaper said. Biden campaign said in a statement.
Trump's disdain for NATO allies came as Biden and his Democratic supporters are trying to divert attention from voters' concerns about the president's age. In a speech at the White House on Friday following the death of Russian activist Aleksei A. Navalny, Mr Biden condemned Mr Trump's comments as “outrageous” for an American president, saying that “from Truman onwards they while When they heard this, they turned in their graves.” (The United States joined NATO in 1949 under President Harry Truman.)
Mr. Biden's campaign described the ad as a “six-figure” push but declined to say exactly how much was spent on it. It said the ad would appear in various forms on Meta, Google, Yahoo Native and YouTube.