Fact check: New Trump attack ad deceptively edits out key words from Harris and The New York Times

By Daniel Dale, CNN

Washington (CNN) — A new television ad from former President Donald Trump’s campaign deletes key words from two separate quotes to deceptively attack Vice President Kamala Harris.

The ad, which Trump also posted on social media on Wednesday, targets Harris on tax policy. Three components of the 30-second spot are dishonest: the two edited quotes and an important statistic, which the ad inaccurately describes.

The ad edits out key words from a Harris quote

The ad twice shows a video clip of Harris saying this: “Taxes are gonna have to go up.” It also shows those words on screen in big, all-caps text.

But the ad cuts out critical words from Harris’ actual comments. What she said in that sentence — at an event in 2019, during her previous presidential campaign — was that “estate taxes are gonna have to go up for the richest Americans.”

By removing the words “estate” and “for the richest Americans,” the ad significantly alters Harris’ meaning.

Here is the full Harris quote from 2019, which you can find around the 15-minute mark of this video: “We’ve got to increase the corporate tax rate. We also have to increase taxes for the top 1%. And that — part of that is going to be about repealing that tax bill that they just passed. And also looking at — estate taxes are gonna have to go up for the richest Americans. And closing certain corporate loopholes, including the carried interest deductible, and a number of other things that are about people not reporting income as income and therefore not being taxed on it as income the way you and I are being taxed.”

The Trump campaign declined to comment on this edit.

The ad edits out key words from a New York Times article

Additional on-screen text in the ad quotes The New York Times as saying, “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes.” It attributes the quote to an August 22 article.

But as the Times itself noted on Thursday, this, too, is a misleading edit. What the August 22 article actually said was this: “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.”

The Trump campaign declined to comment on this edit.

It’s also worth noting that, for obvious reasons, the ad didn’t mention that the previous sentence of the Times article said, “No one making less than $400,000 a year would see their taxes go up” under Harris’ plan.

The ad mislabels a central statistic

The ad cites the Tax Foundation, a right-leaning think tank, as the basis for a narrator’s claim that “Kamala’s plan will raise families’ taxes by nearly $2,600 a year.” On-screen text uses an impressively specific number, $2,580, and attributes it to a Tax Foundation analysis from May 7.

But when CNN asked Tax Foundation senior economist and research director Erica York about the number on Thursday, she responded, “I don’t know where that number comes from. We have done estimates of how taxes would increase if the 2017 tax cuts are allowed to expire but that’s not the number they use and that is not our estimate for Harris’ tax proposals.”

Indeed, the Tax Foundation’s May 7 analysis, which York co-authored, was not about Harris’ various tax proposals. Rather, it was a look at what would happen if Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for individuals expired at the end of 2025, as scheduled, rather than being extended by Congress and the next president. And even then, it didn’t include the number $2,580.

So we asked Trump’s campaign to explain the $2,580 statistic. The campaign provided an explanation, but it wasn’t a good one.

Campaign spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer said the campaign took the Tax Foundation’s May 7 estimates on how much taxes would increase in each state in 2026, on average, if Trump’s individual tax cuts were allowed to expire — and then, Pfeiffer said, the campaign averaged those state averages to come up with a figure for the impact of “Kamala’s plan.”

There are major issues here.

First and foremost, it’s just plain wrong to cite the Tax Foundation analysis as if it’s an analysis of “Kamala’s plan.” Harris has made a bunch of her own tax proposals the Tax Foundation was not considering in this analysis.

Second, it’s not clear that Harris actually wants to let all of Trump’s individual tax cuts expire. As the Times article pointed out, she has promised during the current campaign not to raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000 per year. While Pfeiffer noted that Harris called in 2019 to completely repeal Trump’s law, known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, she is not making such calls today — and York said Thursday that while Harris “hasn’t specified” how she would handle the expiring provisions, it is “possible she would continue the TCJA for people making under $400,000.”

Third, the Trump campaign’s math would be shoddy even if it were accurately labeling that math. You can’t calculate a useful figure for “families” by simply averaging the average for each state. That averaging-the-averages method treats Wyoming, a state that has well under a million people, as the mathematical equal of, say, Pennsylvania, a state that has about 13 million people.

In an ad this slippery, though, the shortcomings of the figure pale in comparison to the mendacity in the way it’s been framed and the mendacity of the quote-snipping.

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