The text came from a fellow journalist. I was driving and glanced at it at a red light. It was a forward of an X post by @realDonadTrump. “You see this!?” my friend had written.
As I glanced at it, I saw the back of a police car and what looked like two legs covered in white. There were black shoes, the toes pointing skyward.
Memory jarred me seconds later. That was a 17-year-old photo of murdered journalist Chauncey Bailey lying dead in the street. From Trump? What the hell? I pulled over and discovered that what I had thought was a photo was the opening image of a video. I hit play.
“This is a journalist named Chauncey Bailey,” a disembodied voice said. “We can’t show you his face. It was blown away by this man’s .12-gauge shotgun,” the narration continued as a photo of a dark-eyed young man came on the screen with the caption “Repeat criminal D. Broussard.” It was followed by a re-creation of Bailey’s 2007 killing, an actor playing a masked gunman firing a shotgun twice.
“Unfortunately, the murderer never should have been there. He should have been in jail,” the narrator continued. “Broussard was previously convicted of brutal assault. San Francisco’s liberal DA Kamala Harris”—the narrator, like Trump, mispronounces Harris’ first name as a photo of her is shown—“put him back on the street instead of in jail. Now, Harris has blood on her hands.”
Then, an all too familiar voice: “I am Donald J. Trump and I approved this message.” A photo of Broussard also appears in a second Trump ad over which a narrator says, “As San Francisco DA liberal Kamala Harris let killers go free.”
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