Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump attempted to appeal to U.S. veterans in a video released on Friday, but the real estate mogul was forced to pull it down a short time later once it was pointed out that the veterans in the video were not American but, instead, were Russian.
"Our great veterans are being treated terribly. The corruption in the Veteran's Administration, the incompetence is beyond," Trump says in the video as the stock footage appears, according to ABC News. "We will stop that, we're going to take care of our Wounded Warriors. These are our greatest people. We will take care of them like they've never been taken care of before."
The images of the soldiers that were used depicted medals that have the communist icon of the hammer and sickle, as well as "CCCP," the acronym for the Soviet Union. The original footage appears to have been taken from the stock footage site Shutterstock and is titled "RUSSIA, TOGLIATTI, MAY 9, 2015, Victory Day: Veterans of World War II with red flowers in hand at the Military Parade, military medals," according to Politico.
"Illegal immigrants in many cases are treated better than our veterans, that's not happening if Trump becomes president," Trump says again into the camera. "Believe me, our veterans will be proud again."
It's not the first Trump campaign ad mix-up, either, as CNN points out. In July, Trump's campaign produced an image showing soldiers wearing German World War II uniforms when they were supposed to be depicting American servicemen. And, earlier this month, the campaign sought to hammer away at the immigration issue by showing immigrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. The video, however, was from Morocco. Trump attempted to brush the error aside by calling it "irrelevant," according to ABC News.
