Donald Trump gave Aflac a free ad on Wednesday — by mentioning a long-forgotten 2005 Aflac commercial that starred his wife, Melania Trump, alongside the Aflac duck.
“Well, your chairman I know very well, and he’s done a fantastic job,” Trump told Aflac representative Michael Porter during a meeting on tax reform. “And they actually, a long time ago, hired my wife to do a big commercial. You know that, right? An Aflac commercial. And I think it was a successful commercial, too.”
That endorsement led internet sleuths to dig up the ad, which is above.
The “Frankenstein”-inspired black-and-white ad features two mad scientists who want to inject “sex appeal” into Aflac’s messaging, so they enlist Melania Trump. No wonder President Trump appreciates the ad.
The mad scientists perform an experiment in which Melania Trump ends up with the Aflac duck’s squawk and webbed feet, and the duck gets her voice. It’s an improvement on the duck’s normal voice, that of comedian Gilbert Gottfried.
Trump’s recollection of the ad played better than some of his other public comments Thursday. He was aggressively fact-checked for wrongly asserting that he had the largest State of the Union address ever.
And Sen. Orrin Hatch’s office was forced to correct him when he said that Hatch had told him he was the country’s “greatest president” ever — greater even than Lincoln or Washington.
“No he did not,” said a spokesman for Hatch.