Donald Trump’s Reaction to This “Mourning in America” Ad Is About 100x More Damning Than the Ad Itself

Around 1 a.m. Monday night/Tuesday morning, Donald Trump launched into a multi-tweet rant aimed at an anti-Trump political action committee made up of conservative commentators and strategists. Under the name “The Lincoln Project,” the group, which includes George Conway (husband to Kellyanne), has published op-eds and released other videos aimed at Trump as well as his allies at Fox News and in the Senate. But so far, none of their projects has gotten this much of a reaction from Trump or the general public.

The ad, titled “Mourning in America,” blames Trump for ignoring the coronavirus that has now affected more than a million Americans, as well as for the worst economy and highest unemployment rate we’ve experienced in decades.

The ad is a play on a classic Ronald Reagan reelection campaign ad, “Morning in America,” which ends with the line, “It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”

This updated version tells its audience, “There’s mourning in America. And under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is weaker, sicker and poorer. And now, Americans are asking, ‘If we have another four years like this, will there even be an America?’”

Trump did not react well.

He called the Lincoln Project members “a group of RINO [Republican in name only] Republicans,” because he has declared himself to be the pinnacle of the Republican party (despite having switched parties five times over the last three decades) and labels any criticism of himself as party opposition.

After claiming the group has “no imagination” because their ad is just a copy of Reagan’s (which, again, is the point), Trump launched into personal attacks on its prominent members.

“I don’t know what Kellyanne did to her deranged loser of a husband, Moonface, but it must have been really bad,” he writes. He labels others “crazed” and “losers.”

He ended his rant by writing, “They’re all LOSERS, but Abe Lincoln, Republican, is all smiles!”

He popped back on Tuesday afternoon to vent some more.

His rant had a clear Streisand Effect on the ad, which, while not the unimaginative “copy” Trump claims it is, isn’t really anything too special. Yet it has 2.6 million views on Twitter and about 700,000 more on Youtube as of this writing. The point of the Lincoln Project is to show other Republicans it’s okay to speak out against Trump and to shine a light on why that dissent is necessary. The ad does that but not in any sort of inventively persuasive way. But Trump’s reaction–to respond to images of people suffering with calls of “Moonface”–does.

The greatest weapon we might have against Trump is himself and his own words. So it makes sense that an ad playing to an audience of one, when it hits right, is so much more effective than a dozen others. I don’t know if that was deliberate but it worked.

(via Twitter, image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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