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In a video tweeted March 3, Joe Biden’s campaign made it look like President Donald Trump called the 2019 coronavirus outbreak a hoax. I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose my country to this man at all, Biden says at the start of the ad, which has been viewed more than 336,000 times. The video cycles through a slew of soundbites from Trump. One clip shows the president’s Feb. 28 rally in North Charleston, S.C. Coronavirus — this is their new hoax, Trump is pictured saying. The video makes it seem like Trump is calling the disease itself a hoax, which he hasn’t done. The words are Trump’s, but the editing is Biden’s. During the North Charleston rally, there was nearly a minute between when Trump said coronavirus and hoax. Here is the full context of his remarks: Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa. They can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes. One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.’ That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was not a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. During a press conference Feb. 29, Trump was asked about his remarks. I'm not talking about what's happening here; I'm talking what they're doing, he said, referring to Democrats. That's the hoax. Trump’s comments feed into a conspiracy theory that claims Democrats and the media are fabricating the threat of COVID-19 to hurt the economy and, by extension, the president’s re-election chances. And the president appeared to downplay the threat of the virus at several points in recent weeks. But the Biden campaign’s ad is misleading. It’s an example of what the Washington Post calls splicing, or editing together disparate videos that fundamentally alters the story that is being told. RELATED: Fact-checking Donald Trump’s mistakes about European travel due to coronavirus Biden’s ad is the latest example of a deceptively edited ad on the campaign trail. On March 7, Dan Scavino, the White House social media director, tweeted a video that appears to show Biden saying we can only re-elect Donald Trump. But the video only showed a snippet of Biden’s larger speech, in which he called for Democratic unity. A similar video tweeted by Michael Bloomberg on Feb. 20 made it look like he left other Democratic presidential candidates speechless during a debate when he didn’t. When we reached out to the Biden campaign for comment, it told us that Trump is the most dishonest president in American history. We don't trust his next-day clean-up attempt, and he has made many comments in that same vein, said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, in an email. Biden’s video is inaccurate. We rate it False.
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