Trump Chaos & Violence Scare Ad Is Actually Just An Old Picture Of Ukraine

The photo shows a crowd of helmeted protesters, gathered around a downed police officer desperately clutching his nightstick. A caption below, written in ALL CAPS to maximise the effect, warns of CHAOS & VIOLENCE.

It is shock advertising at its most routine, designed to stoke fear and provoke a retreat to the safe and familiar. It popped up on Facebook on Tuesday and, as with so many whoppers of the Trump era, its also a lie.

This image that US President Donald Trumps reelection campaign desperately wants you to believe is of anarchy in a Democrat-run US city is ... actually a photo from 2014 of a pro-democracy protest in Ukraine.

Jesse Lehrich, a former Hillary Clinton spokesperson, pointed out the misrepresentation on Twitter, noting that the Trump campaign seemingly downloaded the original file from Wikipedia, which clearly states it was taken in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2014:

LOL

a new Trump ad warning of chaos & violence depicts a cop being attacked by protesters...

...only it's a pic from Kyiv in 2014, when Yanukovich's thugs fought to quash a democratic uprising.https://t.co/VfJujT50Lm pic.twitter.com/QBrlwauo6s

Jesse Lehrich (@JesseLehrich) July 22, 2020","type":"rich","meta":{"author":"Jesse Lehrich","author_url":"https://twitter.com/JesseLehrich","cache_age":86400,"description":"LOLa new Trump ad warning of chaos & violence depicts a cop being attacked by protesters......onlyit's a pic from Kyiv in 2014, when Yanukovich's thugs fought to quash a democratic uprising.https://t.co/VfJujT50Lm pic.twitter.com/QBrlwauo6s Jesse Lehrich (@JesseLehrich) July 22, 2020\n\n","options":{"_hide_media":{"label":"Hide photos, videos, and cards","value":false},"_theme":{"value":"","values":{"dark":"Use dark theme"}}},"provider_name":"Twitter","title":"Jesse Lehrich on 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LOL

a new Trump ad warning of chaos & violence depicts a cop being attacked by protesters...

...only it's a pic from Kyiv in 2014, when Yanukovich's thugs fought to quash a democratic uprising.https://t.co/VfJujT50Lm pic.twitter.com/QBrlwauo6s
Jesse Lehrich (@JesseLehrich) July 22, 2020

Photographer Mstyslav Chernov confirmed to HuffPost that he took the photo in Ukraine in 2014 but declined to comment further.

At the time, much of the country was rebelling against Kremlin-backed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. A Ukrainian court convicted Yanukovitch of treason in 2019 for fleeing the capital for Russia and urging Putin to invade the country to put him back in power. Incidentally, before he was Trumps campaign manager in 2016, Paul Manafort worked for Yanukovitch from 2006 through 2015 and was paid tens of millions of dollars by the Ukrainian president.

Facebooks ad library lists three inactive copies of the ad, all of which were taken offline after they started running yesterday.

The Trump campaign didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.