President Trump’s route to the first presidential debate after landing in Ohio will be lined by nine large anti-Trump billboards depicting migrant children, coronavirus gravestones, and police brutality.
Trump will face off against Democratic nominee Joe Biden at the Cleveland Clinic’s Sheila and Eric Samson Pavilion in Cleveland on Tuesday night in the first of three presidential debates.
The RememberWhatTheyDid.com campaign is a project of Artists United for Change, a political action committee that draws together illustrators and street artists to reach “nontraditional voters,” including young people and Latinos. Among the illustrators is Shepard Fairey, whose “HOPE” poster of Barack Obama came to represent Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.
“We are reminding voters of the harm Donald Trump has caused the Buckeye State through his words and actions,” said Jeff Rusnak, a longtime Ohio Democratic strategist and co-founder of Artists United for Change. “Think about what Donald Trump said. Think about what he did and ask yourself, ‘Is this your America?’”
Fairey’s billboard, pictured below, quotes Trump’s use of the phrase, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” suggesting he would send the National Guard into cities to quell violence. The words were first made famous by the controversial 1967 Miami Police Chief Walter Headley, whose no-holds-barred crackdown on crime in black neighborhoods led to an outcry at the time by civil rights groups. In an interview with Fox News, Trump said he picked the phrase up from Frank Rizzo, a former Philadelphia mayor and police commissioner.
The sign will be among the first to greet Trump as he leaves Cleveland’s Hopkins International Airport.
Billboards by artists Justin Hampton and Nate Lewis, a former intensive care unit nurse, feature Trump’s July 1 comments about the virus, “That’s going to sort of just disappear … I hope,” alongside a chest X-ray. Another depicts rows of coronavirus gravestones with Trump’s quote, “This is so unfair to me,” which the president told an associate in May, according to Vanity Fair.
Biden is expected to attack Trump on his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and Obamacare on Tuesday night. The United States has recorded more than 200,000 coronavirus deaths since the outbreak began earlier this year.
“New polling shows Ohio is dead even, and no Republican has won the White House without Ohio,” Cleveland native and Artists for Change co-founder Scott Goodstein said. “It’s clear Trump and Pence are worried and with good reason. But to vote them out, we all need to stand up and be counted.”
“Some 40% of voters aren’t reached by the usual voter file-matched political advertising, and many of these voters are in communities that are underrepresented at the polls,” Goodstein said.
He added: “So, we are bringing our message to the streets because, in an election year this important, we cannot allow any of our communities to be overlooked.”
Biden leads Trump by 3.3 percentage points in Ohio, according to a RealClearPolitics average of polls.
A billboard by Claudio Martinez shows a small girl crying in the arms of an armed Border Patrol agent as another agent walks a handcuffed woman away. “The U.S. held a record number of migrant children in custody in 2019,” reads a quote from a 2019 article published by USA Today.
“We are connecting what has been said and done with the importance of voting,” campaign co-founder Robin Bell said. “Our message is simple: Remember what they did and vote them out.”
It’s not the first billboard rebuke of Trump in Cleveland.
During the 2016 Republican presidential primary, a giant illustration of the then-GOP nominee embracing political rival Sen. Ted Cruz and appearing ready to kiss him was displayed by a pro-LGBT rights group.
In early September, an anti-Trump group launched a $2 million campaign of live static and digital billboards across Pennsylvania in an attempt to sway voters.
In Washington, Mayor Muriel Bowser commissioned a massive painting on 16th Street in June, which leads to the White House, reading “Black Lives Matter” in giant yellow letters.
