After she was featured in a Trump attack ad, this Philly-area mom is fighting back with the truth

It was inspiring to watch Kimberly Burrell — a grieving mother whose comments have been deceptively used in a Donald Trump attack ad — address reporters at a small news conference in South Philadelphia on Thursday.

Before she took center stage, she told me she was “terrified,” but all I could think of as I listened to her speak was the late activist Maggie Kuhn’s famous quote: “Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.”

If only we were all such courageous truth-tellers, I thought.

But the moment was also tinged with sadness, and a sobering realization.

As much as Trump and his MAGA muffins’ repeated falsehoods about fraud in the 2020 presidential election chip away at our democracy, many more of their continuous lies have immediate consequences.

The lie Trump told during the presidential debate in September — and which his running mate, JD Vance, shamelessly repeated — about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating household pets didn’t just abstractly add to anti-immigrant sentiment, it endangered the lives of a whole community and the place they call home. City Hall was forced to close after a bomb threat. Hospitals were locked down. Schools were evacuated, and a popular festival had to be canceled.

Haitian Americans still fear for their safety, even after the liars have moved on.

The new lies Trump and his allies are peddling about “weather weapons” created by the federal government and the Harris-Biden administration stealing Federal Emergency Management Agency hurricane funds to give to illegal immigrants aren’t just making relief workers a target, they are potentially preventing survivors from seeking help.

On a smaller scale for most of us, but a huge scale for Burrell, the lie that a political action committee is telling by using an out-of-context clip of the lifelong Democrat in a pro-Trump ad has completely disrupted her life.

Burrell looked shell-shocked as she prepared to talk to reporters about comments she made about the difficulty of feeding a family on minimum wage — after a discussion about gun violence, which claimed her son’s life 15 years ago — that were used in support of a man whose character and values she deplores. She blames the current inflation on Trump’s past policies and is voting for Kamala Harris.

“I’ve barely slept,” she told me before she stood at a lectern to read a letter asking Trump to intervene.

It’s not a request she’s sure will get to him, or that he’d be moved by, but after calling, emailing, and using social media to reach his campaign and the Restoration PAC, she felt she had no choice.

Since the national commercial began airing on Oct. 2, Burrell has been forced to explain to family and friends that “no, absolutely not” did she participate in an ad against Harris. Instead, her image and words were hijacked by an unapologetic PAC that clearly didn’t think twice about the person whose words they just plucked off the internet to serve their agenda.

“You’ve stolen my voice and taken a moment of vulnerability from me,” she said in her letter.

But it goes beyond all the messages and calls and side-eyes she’s received. Burrell also fears what the ad might do to her credibility, to the work she does in violence prevention, and to the relationships with the young people she spends every Saturday trying to dissuade from picking up guns.

“Young men need to be able to trust us when we go on the streets,” Burrell said. “They need to be able to trust what we say, that we are who we say we are,” she later told me.

Philadelphia State Sen. Anthony H. Williams, a Democrat, slammed the donors of Restoration PAC, whom he called “privileged and removed from reality” for taking advantage of Burrell’s grief.

“Those of us who understand what patriotism really means, it doesn’t mean oppressing someone, it doesn’t mean exploiting somebody, it doesn’t mean taking advantage,” he said. “As an American who’s a patriot, it means sacrificing yourself for that which may not be politically popular but is necessary to make this country go forward.”

And what is necessary, especially of those who love nothing more than to insist they are the true patriots, isn’t worshiping at the altar of a malignant narcissist who built a malicious movement on lies.

It is telling the truth — and accepting the truth — for the good of all Americans.