A group that backs Hillary Clinton is expanding its scathing assault against Donald Trump in battleground states with a new ad highlighting his mocking of a reporter with a disability.

The emotionally charged ad features an Ohio couple, Chris and Lauren Glaros, talking about raising a toddler with spina bifida.

“The children at Grace’s school all know never to mock her, and so for an adult to mock a person with a disability is shocking,” Lauren Glaros says.

The one-minute spot shows the Republican presidential hopeful waving his arms, widening his eyes and speaking in a weird voice.

“You ought to see this guy,” Trump says of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, whose arthrogryposis impairs his arm movements.

Trump denied he was mocking Kovaleski, who met the businessman about a dozen times when he covered his career in the 1980s.

Chris Glaros, whose daughter is shown smiling in a wheelchair, says the incident exposed Trump’s soul. “It showed me his heart, and I didn’t like what I saw,” he says.

The ad is the third one aired by Priorities USA Action, a super PAC backing Clinton, Trump’s likely Democratic rival. The previous two highlighted Trump’s attitudes toward women, including such derogatory remarks as, “A person that is flat-chested is very hard to be a 10.”

Those spots ran in Ohio, Florida, Virginia and Nevada. The new one will run in those states, and in Iowa, New Hampshire and Colorado, the group said. By the time the GOP convention in Cleveland starts in six weeks, Priorities USA says, it will have spent $26 million on ads attacking Trump’s character.

The spots could be especially harmful to Trump because his campaign and the handful of super PACs that back him have not responded with major ad buys that counter the attacks with a positive portrayal of him.

Priorities USA took a similar approach in battleground states at this stage of President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign four years ago. The group aired spots that successfully defined his GOP challenger Mitt Romney early on as a ruthless plutocrat who enriched himself at the expense of average American workers.

© 2016 the Los Angeles Times
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

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