In the distant and innocent year of 2002, lawmakers really thought they could cut back on negative and corrosive political advertising with one simple trick: Making candidates personally stand behind their ads. Within a year of passage of the McCain-Feingold Act, politicians started appearing at the end of their ads mouthing much-mocked platitudes like, “I’m John Kerry, and I approve this message!”
Though the requirement is technically still in effect, it seems fantastically quaint now. The law never applied to independent or super PAC ads, which drenched the airwaves in mud, and the “stand by your ad” requirements never applied to internet ads, which would soon become one of the dominant ways in which candidates misled voters.
More crucially, the requirement apparently had little effect on the era of Donald Trump. That was evident as recently as Monday, when Trump reposted a video in which he precelebrated his 2024 victory and answered the question of “what’s next for America?” with an image containing the words: “the creation of a unified Reich.”
It was clear in Trump’s first presidential campaign that this level of cartoonish outrageousness would help him get the attention he craved. As Jim Rutenberg of The Times wrote in 2018, the campaign law never stopped Trump or other Republican candidates from advertising blatant lies and overt racism; being crudely aggressive and openly authoritarian, in fact, had become a useful tool.
Former Representative David Price of North Carolina, an architect of the “stand by your ad” provision in 2002, summed up the new attitude this way 16 years later: “I’m the baddest, meanest, most politically incorrect guy in town and will say whatever pops into my head and I regard that as a political virtue.”
The “stand by your ad” law couldn’t prevent this attitude, but if it had been more effective, it might at least have spared the country the embarrassing spectacle of blaming bad ads on some low-level staff member somewhere. In 2015, when Trump retweeted a dumb post mocking Iowa voters for preferring Ben Carson, he later deleted the tweet and put full responsibility on an intern, who he said had apologized. (Trump himself, of course, almost never apologizes.)
In the case of the Reich video, the campaign said it was created by a “random account online” and reposted “by a staffer,” though the posting was done in Trump’s own name. (The campaign took it down the next day, after the inevitable outcry.) Too bad Congress didn’t prohibit blaming the help for a candidate’s deeply offensive messages.
Though the requirement is technically still in effect, it seems fantastically quaint now. The law never applied to independent or super PAC ads, which drenched the airwaves in mud, and the “stand by your ad” requirements never applied to internet ads, which would soon become one of the dominant ways in which candidates misled voters.
More crucially, the requirement apparently had little effect on the era of Donald Trump. That was evident as recently as Monday, when Trump reposted a video in which he precelebrated his 2024 victory and answered the question of “what’s next for America?” with an image containing the words: “the creation of a unified Reich.”
It was clear in Trump’s first presidential campaign that this level of cartoonish outrageousness would help him get the attention he craved. As Jim Rutenberg of The Times wrote in 2018, the campaign law never stopped Trump or other Republican candidates from advertising blatant lies and overt racism; being crudely aggressive and openly authoritarian, in fact, had become a useful tool.
Former Representative David Price of North Carolina, an architect of the “stand by your ad” provision in 2002, summed up the new attitude this way 16 years later: “I’m the baddest, meanest, most politically incorrect guy in town and will say whatever pops into my head and I regard that as a political virtue.”
The “stand by your ad” law couldn’t prevent this attitude, but if it had been more effective, it might at least have spared the country the embarrassing spectacle of blaming bad ads on some low-level staff member somewhere. In 2015, when Trump retweeted a dumb post mocking Iowa voters for preferring Ben Carson, he later deleted the tweet and put full responsibility on an intern, who he said had apologized. (Trump himself, of course, almost never apologizes.)
In the case of the Reich video, the campaign said it was created by a “random account online” and reposted “by a staffer,” though the posting was done in Trump’s own name. (The campaign took it down the next day, after the inevitable outcry.) Too bad Congress didn’t prohibit blaming the help for a candidate’s deeply offensive messages.
