Donald Trump's First TV Ad Reveals His Plan to Keep America Safe: Helicopters

This presidential campaign has gone on for approximately 10,000 years. All across the republic, Americans are so, so tired. People are Googling things like, "Can we have an election right now, today?" and "Do other countries do this better?" and "What about if I tore down my house and used the wood to build a big raft and just sailed off into the sunset forever and ever, what would happen then?" And yet, as of this week Donald Trump, a man who reportedly wouldn't let his own wife see him naked, hadn't released a general election campaign spot. Some pro-Trump Super PACs had run ads, of course. But somehow, the alleged billionaire and star of popular TV show Celebrities You Have Never Heard of Are Shitty to Each Other had yet to inject his famous personality and verve into a commercial targeting the official Democratic nominee.

Well, on Friday Trump came out with an ad. Here it is:

People say that Trump is a different sort of presidential candidate, but the ad, which is running in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina, follows a pretty standard format. The first part is footage of various Bad Things with a grainy filter, then the second part is Good Things in full, vibrant color. It's like those informercials showing people struggling with tangled garden hoses in black and white before the amazing tangle-free hose appears in their lives and makes everything better. Except instead of watering a lawn we're talking about deporting people en masse.

Anyway, let's break it down.

A weird thing to do, if you are running for elected office and presumably encouraging people to vote, is to begin a commercial by implying that the voting process is rigged. Trump has been pushing the standard GOP narrative that voter fraud is common and needs to be addressed with voter-ID laws, but in the ad the whole argument gets reduced to a two-word blanket statement.

Another slightly weird thing is this holding up of Hillary Clinton's quote about admitting 65,000 Syrian refugees as a smoking gun revealing her true intentions or whatever. Sixty-five thousand is not a very big number of people in a country of 318 million. And while it's true that 65,000 Syria refugees would be an increase by American standards, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the 1 million refugees who settled in Germany last year. A million refugees would represent a massive influx of people, but 65,000 carefully screened refugees does not.

The only way you find Clinton's statement damning is if you are unsettled by the notion of Syrian refugees, period—a view that, judging by the comments of Trump and many Republican governors, is increasingly common. In his 1988 farewell address, Ronald Reagan went on a riff about his vision of the US as a "shining city on a hill" and said that, "if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here." Twenty-eight years later, the leader of Reagan's party is like, "lol, no, we need walls."

The Trump campaign also decided to include some footage of brown people being arrested.

The thing about campaign imagery is that it's almost always sourced from someplace else, and it's not always clear where it originated. (That's how Trump mistakenly tweeted a photo of Nazi soldiers, a story no one remembers because it happened 10,000 years ago.) Obviously, the above shot and the onscreen phrase "borders open" implies that these immigrants—on their way to commit crimes, no doubt—are crossing the American border on the top of a train.

Except that's probably not what's happening: This is almost certainly footage of La Bestia, or "the Beast," a nickname for the freight trains migrants ride from Central American countries through Mexico. (You'll get caught easily crossing the US border on top of a train; migrants have to find other ways to sneak past border security.) It's a hellaciously difficult and sometimes deadly journey that has been widely covered in the media—VICE did a documentary on it a few years back. In this ad about "Hillary Clinton's America," in other words, there is an image that may have well come from Mexico.

What does Donald Trump plan to do about all these bad things?

Helicopters.

Helicopters!

HELICOPTERS!

As a result of these helicopters, Americans of all races are once again secure enough to stand on their front porches looking at an American flag.

And heterosexual couples are once again kissing.

And here is a battleship.

This may sound like I'm cutting out the nuance of the "solution" part of the ad in order to be funny, but here is the entire text of the voiceover that's read over these images:

"Donald Trump's America is secure. Terrorists and dangerous criminals kept out. The border secure. Our families, safe. Change that makes America safe again."

This is where we are in the 2016 campaign: immigrants, bad. Trump, good. Secure, safe, men with guns. Verbs, no.

Only 80 more days until the election.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.