Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign has hidden an ad featuring a man claiming to be a struggling small business owner who was in reality a wealthy investor.
The ad featured Joe Malcoun, co-owner of a bar called the Blind Pig in Michigan, who said his business could shut down because of how poorly President Donald Trump handled the coronavirus pandemic. As The Daily Wire previously reported, Malcoun is actually a wealthy “angel investor” who received a large inheritance from his wife’s grandfather nearly a decade ago. In 2018, Malcoun told Click on Detroit that the inheritance was “almost like winning the lottery” and he used the money to become a well-known angel investor in Michigan, helping tech startups.
“Usually you become a CEO and you make money, and then the money allows you to become an angel investor first,” he said in the 2018 interview. “I happened to have different circumstances where I had money [first].”
“We don’t know how much longer we can survive not having any revenue. A lot of restaurants and bars that have been mainstays for many years will not make it through this,” Malcoun said in the ad, which was released last week. “My only hope for my family, this business and my community is that Joe Biden win this election.”
It’s an odd claim to make, not only given the fact that Malcoun faces little chance of financial failure, but because while Trump has refused to institute a national lockdown order, Biden has all but promised to do just that, which would again hurt small businesses just as it did earlier this year when state governors forced businesses to close.
The Daily Caller reported Wednesday that the Biden ad was set to private on the Biden campaign’s YouTube channel sometime between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning.” Malcoun’s Twitter account was also set to private around the same time.
As the Caller reported, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) had said the ad was the “best ad of 2020.”
Malcoun told MLive prior to the Biden ad that the bar’s lack of business was due to communication issues.
“There weren’t a lot of people showing up, which is frankly what we wanted and expected,” he told the outlet. “Now that we tried it and saw it’s really hard to communicate what it means to have a really socially distanced and live music show, we decided it’s not really worth trying.”
As The Daily Wire previously reported:
It is also odd for Malcoun to blame Trump considering it has been Democratic governors that forced businesses such as the Blind Pig to shut down, and Biden promised to do “whatever it takes” to stop the coronavirus, which would include a national shutdown order. Trump has actively refused to institute such an economy-destroying order.
For example, Malcoun has praised Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D-MI) response to the pandemic. Whitmer has instituted lockdown orders that harmed businesses without slowing the spread of COVID-19.