GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump waved off the fact that footage in his first television ad shows images from Morocco as a narrator talks about his building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, saying it’s meant to depict a “dumping ground” and what the United States is going to look like.
“All it is is a display of what it’s going to look like and what our country looks like,” Mr. Trump said on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor” Monday. “That was just video footage. It’s just [a] display of what our country is going to look like.”
In the ad, footage of people running over a hill is played as a narrator says that Mr. Trump “will stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for.”
But the fact-checking site PolitiFact concluded Monday that the displayed footage is actually of a small Spanish enclave in Morocco.
“We’re like a third-world country. We’re a dumping ground, so you [can] just take it any way you want,” Mr. Trump said. “But it’s … merely a display of what a dumping ground is going to look like, and that’s what our country is becoming very rapidly.”
Asked if he thought the footage was a little misleading with the talk of a fence on the United States’ southern border, Mr. Trump said: “No, I think it’s irrelevant.”
“All we want to do is [show] what it’s going to look like,” he said. “They picked something; they could have picked something else. We could pick plenty of footage, that I can tell you, Bill.”
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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