WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is releasing a new ad Friday blasting former President Donald Trump for his embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his “traitorous comments” attacking the NATO alliance.
The 60-second spot, titled “Walk Away,” highlights the 2024 Republican presidential front-runner’s comments last weekend that he would “encourage” Putin and Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that didn’t spend enough on defense.
“No president has ever said anything like it,” the narrator says in the ad, shared first with NBC News. “It’s shameful. It’s weak. It’s dangerous. It’s un-American,” echoing what Biden said earlier this week from the White House about Trump’s remarks.
The ad comes as Russian state media announced Friday that opposition leader and Putin critic Alexei Navalny had died in prison, though the Biden campaign’s plans were in the works before then.
The ad’s narrator says that every president since Harry Truman has honored the U.S.’ commitment to NATO allies, “except for Donald Trump,” and goes on to say Trump wants to “walk away” from NATO, “the cornerstone of America’s security.”
As recently as Wednesday, Trump doubled down on his promise not to defend NATO members who don’t meet certain defense spending targets if elected.
The NATO treaty requires that if one member nation is attacked, other members will aid in its defense. The only time the clause has been invoked was after the 9/11 attacks.
The Biden campaign is launching a three-week, six-figure campaign for the ad through Super Tuesday (March 5), targeting voters in battleground Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania specifically.
The campaign is aiming to reach the more than 2.5 million Americans who identify as Polish, Finnish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian — all NATO countries that share a border with Russia.
“The bottom line is that the only person Donald Trump is loyal to is Donald Trump — not to our allies and certainly not to the American people,” said Biden-Harris 2024 campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez. “And while he thinks that sucking up to Putin and other dictators will make him strong, the American people know him for who he truly is: a coward and a loser.”
