Monday, June 27, 2016

Man featured in Elizabeth Warren's anti-Trump ad voted for Trump


Michael Levin’s photogenic, mixed-race family appears straight from central casting for the modern American middle-class family, seemingly the perfect choice to be featured in Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s video for MoveOn attacking presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Just one problem: Levin is not anti-Trump. In fact, he voted for the billionaire businessman in the Massachusetts primary.
“On Monday I got a text from a friend who said, ‘Hey, I just saw you in the new Warren video attacking Trump.’ And I thought, ‘You've got to be kidding me,’” Levin told "Fox and Friends" on Sunday. “I watched the video, and to my shock and surprise, there I was.”
Levin and his family are featured in two clips about 2:30 into the Internet video. In the first, he’s helping his daughter strap on a bicycle helmet. In the second, Levin and his wife are shown gazing into the distance. Warren’s voiceover during the clips declares: “They pay their fair share.”
Anything Levin pays comes from his job as a writer. He’s contributed to The New York Daily News, Politico, The Huffington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He told "Fox and Friends" that he's written about Trump and 10 seconds of research would have revealed his actual feelings about the Manhattan mogul.
“I’m certainly not anti-Trump,” he said.
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When Levin voted in the Massachusetts primary on March 1, he even brought along his bicycle-riding daughter.
“The little girl you saw in that video actually came with me to the polls with her siblings to watch me vote for him,” Levin said.
So how did Massachusetts' Warren and MoveOn get it wrong? Levin said they simply never asked him. The clip, he said, originated from an Al Jazeera special several years ago about the American family which he agreed to be part of. The Al Jazeera logo is still visible in the lower left corner of the MoveOn video.
“And apparently it's still up on YouTube,” Levin said. “And I think the Warren people just googled ‘American Dream,’ found us, and said, ‘What a nice mixed-race couple. They're probably sort of working-class people.’”
Levin said he hasn’t been contacted by Warren since the video hit the web.
“There were no such calls, and I only found out after the video had gone viral,” he said. “I think about 12 million people have now seen me actually assenting – or appearing to assent – to her position on Trump.”

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