On Wednesday, Kamala Harris’ campaign page shared a Truth Social post from Donald Trump. In it Trump blamed “the complexity of modern day equipment” for making his voice sound “somewhat different and strange” during a live interview on X with Elon Musk. But while the Harris campaign shared what looked like a screenshot of the post, they cut off the last line, where Trump explained that he released “an actual, and perfect, recording of the conversation.”
Exactly why the original broadcast sounded so odd is not totally clear — the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday about what led to the sound quality issues and what tech they used to fix it. But the Harris campaign’s post left out key context that Trump had released a cleaner version of the recording, making the post look purely like an excuse. “Trump blames his confused, slur-filled disaster of an interview with Elon Musk on ‘the complexity of modern day equipment,’” the KamalaHQ account wrote alongside the truncated post on Threads.
It’s not the only example of subtle narrative tweaks the campaign has made to put itself in a more favorable light, or Donald Trump in a less favorable one. On Tuesday, Axios reported that the campaign has bought several ads linking to news stories from outlets like The Associated Press, CNN, and USA Today that show up at the top of Google search results pages. While these sponsored links send users to real news articles, the headline and text of the ads are written by the campaign, though it’s presented by Google in a way that appears like the outlet itself wrote it. Google allows for this and the Harris campaign is certainly not the first to use this tactic. But Facebook actually got rid of a similar feature in 2017 after The Wall Street Journal flagged examples of advertisers changing news site headlines in promoted content. Google’s ad library shows the Trump campaign has not run ads on Google Search.
The headlines are far more glowing than would appear on most news sites. “VP Harris Protects Democracy – Trump Defends Jan 6 Comments,” reads one Harris-sponsored headline linking to The Independent. It’s not clear which specific article it linked to, but The Independent wasn’t happy. A spokesperson said it would seek for the ads to be removed and that it’s “entirely wrong for anyone to put fake headlines under The Independent brand. We object fiercely and believe it is undermining of what politics and journalism should be about.”
Trump, of course, has made far grander, more numerous, and more deceptive statements over the course of his campaign. Just recently, he falsely said Harris “A.I.’d” a crowd of thousands that showed up to see her at a rally in Michigan. He also created a false narrative that Harris “happened to turn Black” as she aspired to higher office. Harris attended the historically black college Howard University, and her father is Jamaican-American.
The Harris campaign has generally favored the informal language and style of modern social media — quickly adopting the “brat” aesthetic in a nod to Charli XCX’s popular album, for example. It’s raising a new set of questions about how to fairly present information and how viewers process internet content. Is an incomplete quote in what looks like a social media screenshot different from a carefully cropped soundbite in an attack ad? For Harris’ campaign, the answer seems to be no.
The Harris campaign declined to comment.
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