Donald Trump attempts ban on ad over his lackluster response to coronavirus in US

Washington : Donald Trump is being portrayed as a deceitful leader of the US in an advertisement on the TV channels, and he is up for a fight against it with legal measures.

A 30-second video ad juxtaposes a number of Donald Trump's statements to underline his alleged non-serious behaviour towards the global crisis of coronavirus that has infected around 600,000 people across the world and claimed nothing less than 27,500 lives till Friday night.

At the end of the video clip, Donald Trump is shown refusing to take the responsibility for lack of testing in the US and then the text comes appears: "America needs a leader we can trust."

According to a news report, Donald Trump's lawyers have now sent a cease and desist letter to television broadcast stations across the country to stop airing the ad created by Priorities USA, a Democratic Super Pac.

The lawyers have pointed out how the edits have been tweaked to show the President in a bad light. The edited video has Trump saying: “Coronavirus. This is their new hoax,” whereas, during the actual speech Trump also referred to the impeachment inquiry and the investigation into Russian interference in the US elections as hoaxes.

Read the full excerpts below:

"Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs, you say, “How’s President Trump doing?”, “Oh, nothing, nothing.” They have no clue, they don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa, they can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes. One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.” That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since he got in. It’s all turning, they lost. It’s all turning, think of it, think of it. And this is their new hoax."

The Trump lawyers have tagged the edit as "patently false, misleading, and deceptive." They have written a letter to the channel saying, "Your station has an obligation to cease and desist from airing [the advert] immediately to comply with FCC licensing requirements, to serve the public interest, and to avoid costly and time-consuming litigation."

In another line, the letter states that failure to remove the advert could be classed as an abdication of licensee responsibility. The president controls the FCC and appoints its commissioners, so it is up to them to pull broadcast licenses for stations that do not comply with its requirements.

The line reads: "Your station has a responsibility to ‘protect the public from false, misleading or deceptive advertising’ … your failure to remove this deceptive ad … could put your station’s license in jeopardy."