Kamala Harris’ campaign on Tuesday dropped a new ad starring some of Donald Trump’s former senior administration officials tearing into the man they once served.
The montage of scathing comments from the Republican nominee’s ex-colleagues-turned-critics comes ahead of the former president’s first debate against Harris in Philadelphia. The ad will air in the city as well as in West Palm Beach—where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort is located—along with a nationwide rollout on Fox News, according to Politico.
The ad, which is titled “The Best People,” compiles footage of Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and national security adviser John Bolton. The ex-officials are variously shown saying they won’t endorse Trump in the 2024 election, calling him untrustworthy, and describing him as pathologically self-interested.
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“In 2016, Donald Trump said he would choose only the best people to work in his White House,” a voiceover says in the Harris-Walz ad. “Now those people have a warning for America: Trump is not fit to be president again.”
The ad then quotes Pence saying in August 2023: “Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should, never be president of the United States.” It also includes a clip of Pence saying in a Fox News interview earlier this year that it should “come as no surprise” that he “will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year.”
Clips from Bolton speaking in interviews with CNN also made into the supercut of shame. “The only thing he cares about is Donald Trump,” Bolton says in one.
The ad further features a segment of the speech Milley gave during his last speech as Joint Chiefs chair in September 2023. “We don’t take an oath to a king or a queen or a tyrant or a dictator,” Milley says. “And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”
“Take it from the people who knew him best,” the narrator says in the Harris’ campaign ad. “Donald Trump is a danger to our troops and our democracy. We can’t let him lead our country again.”
The ad is set to run throughout the week, the campaign told Politico. In a statement to the outlet, Harris-Walz principal deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said the spot would remind Fox News viewers and possibly Trump himself that his “own national security team can’t stomach him anymore because of how he’d put the country at risk.”
“To every American who understands the threat that Donald Trump poses, who cares about upholding the Constitution, who believes in the rule of law, and who knows America is stronger when it leads, there’s a home for you in Vice President Harris’ campaign,” Fulks added.
