By Stephen Macaulay
- Talk to any producer of a local morning TV news program and you’ll learn that fires get significant attention because people watch. It doesn’t matter if it is an abandoned warehouse the ownership of which is unknown that is in the middle of nothing so that there isn’t any potential for collateral damage: People watch.
2. Attack ads are like warehouse fires. Or in this election cycle, dumpster fires.
People watch.
3. A political attack ad is like a caricature. In creating a caricature, the artist exaggerates a salient feature. It is something that stands out but taken to the nth degree.
Arguably, if the exaggeration is a foundational element of an attack ad, then most of what could be considered “attack ads” (or “negative ads”) by the Lincoln Project or any other organization targeting the Trump administration aren’t.
That’s simply because what would seem to be a grotesquerie is a reality.
There are 210,195 Americans dead from COVID-19. That we know of.
There are 7,459,101 infected with the disease.
There are millions of Americans unemployed. According to the latest from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics:
“In September, the number of unemployed persons who were jobless less than 5 weeks increased by 271,000 to 2.6 million. The number of persons jobless 5 to 14 weeks decreased by 402,000 to 2.7 million, and the number of persons jobless 15 to 26 weeks fell by 1.6 million to 4.9 million. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) increased by 781,000 to 2.4 million.”
It is now thought that a large percentage of them are going to be permanently unemployed.
No caricature. No exaggeration. That’s how it is.
4. Let’s be clear.
Trump didn’t cause the virus.
Let’s also be clear on this: He didn’t do everything he could to protect and preserve the people of the United States of America.
If wearing masks could, so scientists and doctors and public health experts the world over insist, save lives (according to Vin Gupta, MD, MPA, MSc, is an Affiliate Assistant Professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, on MTP Daily September 18, if people in the U.S. started wearing masks that day, as many as 200,000 lives could be saved by December 1; he also said that there is “convincing evidence” that had there been a two-week earlier shutdown of the economy and mask country-wide mask wearing there could have been an estimated 70% of lives saved), then shouldn’t Team Trump have been wearing masks 24-7 and making sure the American people saw them doing so?
5. When Trump returned from Walter Reed National Military Center to the White House and did the dramatic mask removal that was an attack ad on the health and wellbeing of all Americans.
Hugely grotesque.
People watch. People die.
Macaulay is a cultural commentator based in Detroit.