The Democratic National Committee is launching its first paid media campaign attacking former President Donald Trump and his vice presidential pick, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), over Project 2025.
The media campaign, which will focus on Project 2025, a conservative agenda platform proposal spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, comes after calls from both sides of the aisle to tone down political rhetoric. It will include 16 new billboards and one mobile billboard in the Milwaukee area, where the Republican National Convention is being held.
“The Trump-Vance ticket is running on an extreme Project 2025 agenda — and the American people deserve to know that they’re planning to rip away their health care, gut Social Security, strip their reproductive freedoms, and shill for big corporations on the backs of working families,” DNC Rapid Response Director Alex Floyd said.
Trump and Vance (R-OH) were selected as the GOP presidential and vice presidential nominees on Tuesday. Trump’s announcement that Vance would serve as his vice president was preempted by suspense as other potential running mates were told they would not be selected.
The former president has reiterated claims that he knows nothing about Project 2025, as Democrats have latched on to the platform proposal as another example of how a second Trump presidency is a “threat to democracy.”
“If Trump were trying to distance himself from Project 2025, then he probably shouldn’t have chosen as his running mate the man who just days ago said that the extreme blueprint is full of ‘good ideas,’” Floyd said. “The more the American people learn about Trump and Vance, and their terrifying Project 2025 agenda, the clearer the choice will be to choose President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ vision that protects our basic freedoms come November.”
The mobile billboard will be present all day in downtown Milwaukee and near the entrance to the RNC convention beginning at 7:30 a.m. Wednesday.
The billboard campaign comes a few days after Trump was shot in the ear at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief, died Saturday during the attempt to kill the former president, with two others injured as well. Secret Service agents fatally shot the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks.
Following the news of the shooting, both Democrats and Republicans took to social media and TV talk shows to call for a toning down on inflammatory rhetoric and condemned political violence.
President Joe Biden immediately paused all ad reservations and outbound campaign communications following the Trump assassination attempt and urged voters in a nationally televised address to “lower the temperature” surrounding the election. Biden also expressed regret over using the term “bullseye” when arguing it was time to reroute focus away from his debate performance onto Trump.
“There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence ever. Period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized,” the president stated on Sunday night. “Unity is the most elusive goal of all, but nothing is important as that right now. We’ll debate and we’ll disagree. That’s not going to change. But it’s going — we’re not going to lose sight of the fact who we are as Americans.”
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However, Trump’s selection of Vance as his running mate appeared to end the short moratorium on Democratic counter-messaging.
Some Republicans like Reps. Kat Cammack (R-FL) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) blasted Democrats and the media’s “violent rhetoric” against Trump as the reason for the assassination attempt.
