The Trump campaign used stock footage of a man sitting in a basement, claiming that it was an American unable to afford a home while it was actually filmed in Ukraine 25 miles from the frontline.
The dramatic footage shows a man working on his laptop as he shelters from the shelling of the Russian invasion in Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine last year, according to the New York Post.
In the ad released on Wednesday, the Trump campaign slammed President Joe Biden for the effect inflation has had on Americans during his time in the White House.
To make this argument, instead of using footage of Americans, the Trump campaign used footage from Ukraine, showing the man sitting in a basement as a voiceover claims that young Americans can’t buy homes because of high inflation.
Another piece of stock footage used in the video shows a young couple seemingly walking away from a real estate agent. That clip was also filmed in Ukraine, in Lviv, in the western part of the country in 2021 before the war began in February of last year.
The Trump campaign ad was entitled Mourning in America and criticised Mr Biden for his handling of the southern US border, the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, as well as trans issues.
As the footage from Ukraine can be seen, the voiceover states: “Under Biden’s unprecedented inflation, the hope of home ownership gone. And young adults, forced to abandon seeking the American dream to live in their parents’ basement longer.”
The man behind the footage showing the couple failing to purchase a home told the New York Post that he “can only say bad things about Trump”.
The creator said he didn’t want to be identified to avoid affecting his relationship with his stock footage vendor.
“But unfortunately, anyone can buy our or another video … I can’t control it,” he told the paper. “I wouldn’t want him to use [the] video in his ad. But rules are rules.”
Yevhen Shkolenko owns the company that filmed the footage in the basement in Zaporizhzhya. He told the Post that the man in the footage is an actor but shows what Ukrainians have to deal with as air sirens ring out to warn of an incoming strike by the Russians.
“This video was made 100 per cent in Ukraine during war in real sheltered basement in my city Zaporizhzhya, which is 40 km (25 miles) [from the] frontline,” Mr Shkolenko told the paper. “We were one of those who stayed in our city to help people and the army and we continued our work of filming and when we were doing this filming, we went down to the basement many times in order to hide from rocket fire.”
The Trump campaign released the attack ad shortly before Donald Trump appeared on CNN for a town hall event that was widely criticised for giving a platform for the former president to spout a litany of lies.
During the town hall event in front of a friendly audience, Mr Trump claimed that he would be able to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours after re-entering the Oval Office on 20 January 2025 simply by speaking to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he refused to call a war criminal.
Mr Trump also refused to say if he wanted Ukraine to be victorious, instead arguing that he wanted the fighting to cease, adding that calling someone a war criminal might be detrimental to a possible peace process.
A former Trump official who worked on his re-election campaign in 2020 told the Post that “as president, Trump bragged about the billions of dollars worth of weapons and aid he sent to Zelensky in Ukraine. Now he’s paying for stock footage from Ukraine to depict the American Dream in his lame campaign ads? What a joke”.
The Independent has reached out to the Trump campaign for comment.
