Donald Trump didn't take kindly to a campaign ad supporting his opponent, Kamala Harris, released in the final days of the presidential campaign. Produced by the organization Vote Common Good, which aims to motivate religious conservatives hostile toward the Republican candidate to vote, the 30-second video, with a voiceover by actress Julia Roberts, features a woman inside a polling station.
Encouraged by her husband to fulfill her civic duty, she enters the voting booth and opts to tick the Democrat's box. Afterward, she assures her husband, who apparently came out in favor of the other candidate, that she voted correctly. The actress's voice is reassuring: "In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know." A transparent allusion to the removal of federal abortion protections through a decision by the conservative-majority Supreme Court in 2022.
"I'm so disappointed at Julia Roberts(...) She's going to look back on that and she's going to cringe," said Trump during a protracted appearance on the conservative Fox News channel's morning show on Saturday, November 2. "Can you imagine a wife not telling a husband who she's voting for? Did you ever hear anything like that? Even if you have a horrible − if you had a bad relationship, you're going to tell your husband. It's a ridiculous ad. So stupid."
The Republican candidate added his voice to a chorus of conservative protests. Three days earlier, a host on the same network, Jesse Watters, asserted that if his wife Emma ever did that, it would be "like having an affair."
"That violates the sanctity of our marriage. What else is she keeping from me? What is she lying about?" he said.
Charlie Kirk, a young star of the conservative movement, also found the clip "so gross" and "nauseating." All the more so because the woman on screen is wearing a cap with the American flag, he said. "She's coming in with her sweet husband who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go, you know, and have a nice life and provide to the family, and then she lies to him saying, 'Oh, yeah, I'm gonna vote for Trump,' and then she votes for Kamala Harris," he said, outraged.
A former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, also decried "dishonest" people. "For them to tell people to lie is just one further example of the depth of their corruption. I mean, how do you run a country where you're walking around saying, 'Wives should lie to their husbands, husbands should lie to their wives'? What kind of totally amoral, corrupt, sick system have the democrats developed?" he said, fuming.
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