A super-PAC backing Hillary Clinton has released an advertisement quoting Donald Trump on nuclear weapons, the latest such spot from Clinton’s side calling to mind former President Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy” attack against Barry Goldwater.
The ad from Priorities USA, entitled “I Love War”, intersperses footage of ISIS and bomb tests among the GOP presidential nominee’s rhetoric, including his December debate comment, “For me, nuclear, just the power, the devastation, is very important to me.”
Just more than two weeks ago, Clinton’s official campaign arm uploaded a 30-second spot called “Just One” to the web, which questions Trump’s foreign policy judgment and uses audio of military aircraft in-flight. “All it takes is one wrong move,” the narrator says.
Together, the two commercials suggest an offensive against Trump’s judiciousness with matters of war and peace—something used to great effect a half-century ago, when LBJ’s video of a little girl counting the petals she picked from a flower as a bomb countdown began to play stirred controversy and conversation about Goldwater’s fitness to be commander in chief.
Trump has rebutted similar attacks against him on the campaign trail, saying Clinton has a weak and damaging diplomatic legacy. “Her bad instincts and her bad judgment” as secretary of state, Trump said during the Republican convention, “are what caused the disasters unfolding today.”
“This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction and weakness.”
