There’s a new Hillary Clinton ad on the Internet. It is billed as the “Director’s Cut” of her “Role Models” ad, which — in the original version — features children watching TV as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says offensive things.
However, in the new version of the video, the children are watching Hillary Clinton instead — fuming about Benghazi, gloating about the death of Muammar Gaddafi, lying to Congress about her emails, and flip-flopping on her ideological views.
Throughout, the ad simply uses the images as the Clinton original, intercut with the messages: “Our children are watching … Don’t raise them on lies.”
The video culminates with footage of CNN’s Anderson Cooper asking Hillary Clinton during a debate: “Do you change your political identity based on who you’re talking to?” After she responds, “No,” the ad jumps to an infamous clip of Clinton imitating an African-American accent in a speech at a church in Selma, Alabama in 2007.
It ends: “Are you still with her?”
The video, which merely uses Clinton’s own ad as a template, suggests that other parodies would easily be possible, whether focused on Hillary Clinton, her husband (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman”), or even other Republicans. It could become a new version of the “Downfall” meme, also known as “Hitler finds out,” which plays on the climactic scene of the 2004 biopic, showing the Führer in his bunker as he reacts to news of the perilous state of the German army in Berlin.
The “Downfall” parodies use new subtitles to show Hitler “finding out” different kinds of bad news. The “Role Models” parody requires splicing clips into a video without dialogue — a task easily achieved with already-installed software on most PCs.
The Trump campaign has spent little on ads thus far. Given the Clinton campaign’s funding advantage, Trump — whom critics have accused of being too frugal — might well find it easier to leave freelancers to mock Clinton’s expensive productions.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.