President Biden’s reelection campaign Quick Response Digital Advertising On Friday, former President Trump was filmed kissing former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio on stage.
The kiss took place at a rally on Thursday, when the former president called the 91-year-old Arpaio onto the stage, embraced him and then sent an air kiss near the former police officer’s right ear.
“I don’t kiss men, but I kissed him,” Trump told a crowd at Phoenix’s Dream City Church, which advocates that marriage is “between a man and a woman.”
Biden’s new ad ends with Trump’s kissing remark, with news coverage of Arpaio’s most controversial actions as sheriff leading up to the moment played in a 30-second supercut that loops the onstage kiss on a split screen.
The digital ads will target Latino voters in Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
Sheriff Arpaio became notorious as a villain in immigrant communities for his heavy-handed immigration enforcement policies, including the construction of “tent cities” open-air prisons that the sheriff himself likened to “concentration camps” in 2008.
In 2011, the Department of Justice (DOJ) found that Arpaio engaged in the worst act of racial profiling by law enforcement in U.S. history.
The decision was based on a series of police actions in Maricopa County, including sheriff’s deputies stopping a disproportionate number of vehicles driven by Latinos, and prison guards refusing to accept requests written in Spanish by inmates.
The Justice Department report was submitted by Tom Perez, who was then assistant attorney general for civil rights and is now a senior adviser to Biden.
In 2012, the Department of Justice filed suit against Arpaio to “end discriminatory and unconstitutional law enforcement practices” after he failed to follow the report’s recommendations.
President Trump eventually pardoned him on those charges in 2017.
The two sides agree on how to approach immigration enforcement, but they also agree on trying to prove that former President Obama was not born in Hawaii.
Trump began questioning Obama’s birthplace in television interviews in 2011, publicly claiming that Obama’s birth certificate was fake, a false claim that Arpaio had long made.
While Arpaio is popular among Trump supporters, the Biden campaign is trying to highlight Trump’s ongoing ties to the former sheriff, who is deeply unpopular among Latinos.
Trump is scheduled to visit Las Vegas on Sunday to launch his campaign’s newly named Hispanic outreach initiative, “Latinos for Trump.”
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