‘It was wrong to do that’: Republican CEO wants Trump campaign to remove footage of his SC factory from ad

A CEO whose company was briefly featured in a new TV ad from President Donald Trump’s campaign is asking for the footage to be removed immediately, telling McClatchy that he doesn’t want his business to be associated with an administration that pursued trade policies he says forced him to lay off employees.

“I would like them to remove it because it was completely unauthorized,” Arnold Kamler, who runs Kent International, Inc., a bicycle manufacturing company whose plant in South Carolina appeared in the ad, said in an interview. “It’s also not true. We haven’t had any help from the administration at our factory in South Carolina.”

The Trump ad in question criticizes Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on taxes before touting the president’s own economic record, a message that has become increasingly central to his re-election campaign as the race enters its final weeks.

About 20 seconds in, the spot features a woman assembling a bicycle at a manufacturing plant. The clip only lasted approximately a second, but the footage was conspicuous enough that Kamler said friends and colleagues began notifying him about it soon after the ad began airing.

Kamler was eventually able to confirm that the footage featured a manufacturing plant in Manning, S.C., that operates under the company’s Bicycle Corporation of America brand. The video clip itself appears to be pulled from a 2017 CBS Evening News report about the facility.

“At first I thought they were joking,” Kamler said. “And they actually DVR’d the advertisement video on their phone.”

Kamler, who is a Republican himself, said the problem is that Trump’s tariffs on trade with China, which supplies parts for the bicycles to be assembled domestically, were a major burden on the company. So it was galling for him to see footage of the company used in an ad to tout the strength of Trump’s economy.

“We were surprised,” Kamler said. “It was wrong to do that. While the Trump administration has said that they’ve done a lot of things to help manufacturing, we haven’t received any help from them.”

Kamler has been outspoken in his opposition to Trump’s tariffs, writing an op-ed last year in the Washington Post to highlight how he said they were slowing expansion plans at his company. He’s also appeared on CNN to denounce them.

“The one thing that should be clear to most Americans is that China isn’t paying these tariffs,” he said. “It’s the U.S. importers that are paying them and the U.S. consumers that are paying it.”

Kamler said that even if he doesn’t think Trump has helped manufacturing, previous Democratic administrations haven’t either.

“Both administrations, for years, no one wants to help low-tech manufacturing in the US, and it’s wrong,” he said.

The Trump campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

Kamler said he’s worked well with GOP officials in the past, citing South Carolina’s Republican Gov. Henry McMaster and former Gov. Nikki Haley. But he said in this election, he’s going to vote for Biden.

“I’m a Republican who will not vote for President Trump in the next election,” Kamler said.