Trump looks to upstage DNC with swing-state events, multi-million dollar digital ad blitz
President Donald Trump won't sit idly by during the Democratic National Convention next week.
Trump is not only scheduled to deliver a speech just hours before Joe Biden accepts the Democratic nomination right outside the former vice president’s hometown in Pennsylvania, he will also hold counter programming events in three other swing states and will launch a massive multi-million dollar digital ad blitz that includes taking over the banner of YouTube for 96 hours starting on Tuesday.
The four-day digital ad campaign that will cost up to “high-seven figures," a Trump campaign official told ABC News, will plaster the president's messaging across some of the most coveted digital real estate during a convention that will surely be mostly watched online. The ads will ramp up familiar attacks on the Democratic platform as a "radical left" nightmare for Republicans," sources said.
The campaign will not only take over the YouTube main banner, ads will also appear across the homepages of top news websites -- including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and FoxNews.com -- as voters are expected to be searching for updates on the DNC.
Trump's campaign has also purchased premium “unskippable” ads to run on streaming sites like Hulu in swing states, meaning viewers watching the DNC online on such platforms will have to sit through a complete Trump ad first.
Trump campaign officials claimed they had the opportunity to snatch up the ad real estate because Democrats had left the space available.
"It’s great that Team Biden let the Trump campaign grab up the best premium real estate on the internet during Joe’s big week,” Trump campaign Communications Director Tim Murtaugh said in a statement. "We’ll show millions of Americans exactly how the radical, leftist takeover of Joe Biden is now complete.”
In response, the Biden campaign mocked the now infamous Tweet from former campaign manager Brad Parscale nicknaming the Trump campaign "Death Star" and said the ad buy was one of the campaign's "stunts."
"The 'Death Star' brags about wasting money on stunts almost as much as they pretend that boat parades are more important than finally bringing the pandemic under control. No smoke and mirrors charade can conceal that Donald Trump's failed leadership has cost over 167,000 Americans their lives and driven the strong economy he inherited from the Obama-Biden Administration into one of the deepest recessions in our history," Biden spokesperson Andrew Bates told ABC News.
On Thursday evening, Biden will give his acceptance speech at the Chase Center, a large event space on the waterfront in Wilmington, Delaware, the Biden campaign confirmed. Trump will deliver is own remarks attacking Biden's "record of failure" in Old Forge, Pennsylvania.
Trump's speech will cap off a string of all-out efforts by the president to counter the Democrat's convention week. He has planned three other campaign events in swing states including Minnesota, Wisconsin on Monday and Arizona on Tuesday.
This is a familiar tactic for Trump, who held counter rallies throughout the Democratic primary contests.
In response to the news that Trump will visit Pennsylvania the day Biden will accept the Democratic Nomination, Bates slammed Trump for failing to get the virus under control and costing Pennsylvanians lives, calling the trip a “sideshow” and a “pathetic attempt to distract” from the Trump presidency.
ABC News' Molly Nagle contributed to this report.
