We keep reading and hearing in conservative circles an assertion that President Trump didn’t call the coronavirus a hoax. He and his supporters claim that the left and the media twisted his words from a Feb. 28 campaign rally in South Carolina.
In fact, this week, the Trump campaign has upped this lie to a whole new level after, on Wednesday, the likely Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, offered to call Trump and discuss pandemic policy. On Thursday, the Trump campaign released a new Twitter ad with video of Biden – doctored to make it look as though Biden says, “The coronavirus is a hoax.”
But Biden never called the coronavirus a hoax. The audio is spliced together from two different times that Biden spoke, according to The Hill. Twitter has labeled the fake video of Joe Biden as “manipulated.”
The Trump campaign told the conservative-leaning Hill that it did this “to draw attention to what it views as Twitter’s double standard in policing political speech.”
The Hill writes: “The new Trump campaign video is styled after an ad released by the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA, which featured misleading audio of Trump describing the coronavirus as a ‘hoax.’ The president’s campaign has flagged multiple Democratic videos for Twitter in which the president is heard calling the coronavirus a ‘hoax,’ arguing that the content runs afoul of the social media giant’s manipulated media guidelines. Twitter has declined to sanction the Democratic ads.”