New York - Twenty-four hours after the controversy caused by the Donald Trump’s fake video footage where it showed Morocco-Melilla borders as being Mexico-US borders, his campaign members said the video was “mistake,” just to have a change of heart less than an hour later.
New York – Twenty-four hours after the controversy caused by the Donald Trump’s fake video footage where it showed Morocco-Melilla borders as being Mexico-US borders, his campaign members said the video was “mistake,” just to have a change of heart less than an hour later.
Not even 24 hours went by before Donald Trump campaign members contradicted themselves publicly, not once but twice.
On Monday, the Trump campaign released their first TV ad, which has caused a commotion way beyond the U.S. borders. The controversy has reached 5,000 miles away to Morocco.
Trump’s 30-second “approved message” includes footage of dozens of Sub-Saharan African migrants trying to cross the Morocco-Melilla borderline. Trump disguised the scene as happening in the US-Mexico borders.
After PolitiFact traced the legitimacy of the footage and unveiled its origin, media outlets all over the world and social media users have questioned the intent of using Morocco instead of Mexico to prove a point of illegal immigration.
Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said “No sh** it’s Morocco, claiming that the use of Moroccans instead of Mexicans was “1,000 percent on purpose” to paint a picture of what the U.S. will “look like” if a wall is not built.
Donald Trump followed Lewandowski remarks on Monday night when he said on Fox News: “All it is, is a display of what it’s going to look like and what our country looks like. That was just video footage. It’s just a display of what our country’s going to look like.”
“We’re like a third-world country; we’re a dumping ground. So you can just take it any way you want, but it’s really merely a display of what a dumping ground is going to look like. And that’s what our country’s becoming very rapidly,” he added.
So just when the world had a hard time believing that the use of Morocco’s border footage was “intentional,” Trump campaign special counsel Michael Cohen admitted on national TV that the use of the footage was a “mistake.”
“Yeah, I’m going to have a conversation with whoever made the mistake — there’s no doubt about that,” Cohen said in an interview for CNN contradicting Lewandowski’s statement.
“The bottom line is it’s the same thing. So it’s Morocco, it’s Mexico — the people are pouring into this country. … What’s the difference? The point is that they’re coming through,” he added bluntly.
However, later on Tuesday, Cohen seemed to have had a change of heart and contradicted himself. In an email to The Washington Post, he said he was not aware of the question they asked him earlier.
“I wasn’t aware of the question as stated, knew little about the ad or campaign strategy, but after connecting with the Trump campaign, I understand it was done that way to demonstrate that the United States has become a dumping ground for other countries who are continually taking advantage of us. I do not speak for Mr. Trump or the campaign,” Cohen wrote.
To set the record straight, American political strategist Richard Goodstein, Campaign Advisor to Hillary 2008 campaign had plenty to say regarding Trump’s so-called “intentional mistake”.
“Trump has two people closest to him, his campaign manager and his lawyer, and even they are so used to Trump’s lies that they can’t get on the same page about what is a lie on purpose, and what is a lie by accident,” Goodstein stressed in a statement to Morocco World News.
“And in classic Trump form, once his lawyer admitted a mistake, he must have gotten chewed out for it, so he then claimed total ignorance,” he added explaining why Cohen retracted his remarks on live TV.
According to Goodstein, the Trump campaign has made so many mistakes in the course of this presidential race that it has become the normal.
“Total ignorance’ is the one thing the Trump campaign can actually claim as their hallmark. They should just stick with that as their explanation for everything they say and do,” he concluded.