Harp Campaign Tries Out A Trump Card

The first thing you see is President Donald Trump opening his mouth wide, his eyes squinting over a double chin. His cheeks are turning red; the words “Over Confidence and Incompetence” float in big, blocky letters an inch above his head. Someone hands him a pile of gold coins from outside of the frame. A speech bubble trails from his mouth, outlined with the same black as the letters.

“I’m Going To Build A Wall And Mexico’s Going To Pay For It!” he announces to a crowd that is somewhere outside of the frame.

Then there’s a more familiar sight just below him. Mayoral Candidate Justin Elicker lifts a mic to his mouth, ready to speak. He too has a speech bubble, filled with the words: “When I become mayor, I’m going to make Yale give the city $50 million." From the left side of the page, a blazer-clad arm reaches in, holding out a stack of crisp dollar bills.

But are these two men actually anything like each other? Can a cartoon convince us that they are?

That’s one of the questions Toni Harp’s campaign has raised with a recent double-sided flyer attacking Elicker, who has come out hard against his competition since announcing his candidacy in January of this year. The flyer made its debut Wednesday night, at a candidate forum at New Haven’s Celentano School. Prospect Hill/Newhallville Alder Steve Winter, whose ward contains Celentano, expressed dismay at the imagery and messaging Thursday morning.

“It's unacceptable,” he wrote in an email. “The city faces many serious challenges in improving our fiscal condition, providing quality our education, and pathways for employment. We all care about this city: we need a civil campaign focused on real issues, not shocking attack ads comparing one another to Donald Trump.”

The designs, which were approved and paid for by the Harp campaign, are the brainchild of City Youth Services Director Jason Bartlett, who is serving as Harp’s campaign chairman this year. In an email Thursday morning, he confirmed that he approved the flyers earlier this month but declined to give the name of the graphic designer with whom the campaign worked. He said that he came up with the idea after observing, as he saw it, inconsistency in Elicker’s platform.

“We clearly feel that with some of the things that he’s been saying, it just feels like he’s pandering to everyone,” he said. “When he says, for example, ‘I think it’s terrible that the police union has gone without a contract for three years,’ you would think that he supports the police. But then he goes and portrays the police in a very negative light. And within the same construct, you’re saying two things. You’re on both sides of an issue, and your narrative is not consistency.”

For Bartlett, that meant a comparison to Donald Trump, who has attracted anti-immigrant support and vitriol with his sustained promise of a border wall between the United States and Mexico, was in order. On one side of the flyer, a 2013 Elicker and Trump are pictured on opposite sides of the page, separated by Heather Murphy’s New York Times op-ed “Why High-Class People Get Away With Incompetence.”

On the other side, the Harp campaign has responded directly to Elicker’s call for Yale University to raise its voluntary payment to the city to $50 million per year, up from a current $11.5 million. After first hearing that Elicker had made that pitch at a fundraiser earlier this month, Bartlett said that he thought of Trump's ability to galvanize voters with unsubstantiated and fantastical rhetoric.

He did not comment on the president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies (he has, for instance, called for painting a border wall black and adding barbed wire, further injuring those who try to cross), which stand in sharp contrast to Elicker’s call to enshrine into law New Haven’s sanctuary city status. In a phone call Thursday afternoon, Harp Campaign Manager Edward Corey said that the campaign had no intention of drawing political or policy-based similarities between Elicker and Trump, so much as "we wanted to capture the absurdity" of Elicker's $50 million proposal.

"He's throwing something out to voters that sounds great, but it's a fantasy," Corey said. "At the end of the day, you can't just wave a wand an create $50 million. Mayor Harp has to deal with the fact that she has to sit at the negation table and work with this institution."

“There’s a real symmetry between the styles that they’re both embracing,” Bartlett said. “That’s why we used the New York Times article—to show people using not necessarily well-thought-out ideas to essentially trick people into following them. This really feels like Donald Trump, and this really feels like what our opponent is doing right now.”

Bartlett added that the bright, cartoon-like details on one side (which enter the images into a complex centuries-old history of political cartooning, ephemera and graphic novels, including Captain America punching Hitler’s lights out during WWII) are meant to keep the flyer “lighthearted,” and that he expects voters to draw their own conclusions from the images.

He said that the team chose to stick closer to the imagery and color scheme used by Marvel Comics instead of the biting political cartoons that have defined regimes, dictatorships and even the country’s political climate. 

Some New Haveners haven’t taken it that way. After seeing the flyers circulating Wednesday, Elicker expressed surprise and disappointment to their messaging.

“New Haven faces growing racial and economic inequality, double digit property tax increases, and a looming fiscal crisis that's been preceded by multiple credit rating downgrades,” he wrote Wednesday night by text message. “Voters aren't looking for cartoons or childish antics, they're looking for adult supervision for a city hall in chaos."