GOP Senate Hopeful Airs Wild Ad Vowing to Shut Down the Government Over the Border Wall

Alabama Republican congressman Mo Brooks is out with a new ad for his campaign to fill Attorney General Jeff Session’s former Senate seat. And because the 2016 presidential election is a hellish black hole from which we will seemingly never escape, Brooks’ ad focuses exclusively on one of President Trump’s signature—and still unfulfilled—campaign promises: Building a massive border wall between the United States and Mexico.

“President Trump promised a wall to keep us safe and to protect American jobs for American workers,” Brooks explains to the camera in his new ad, first shared with White House mouthpiece Breitbart. “But even some establishment Republicans are blocking the way. Elect me to the Senate, and I’ll fight every spending bill that doesn’t fund that wall. I’ll even read the King James Bible until the wall is funded.” This, of course, is an overt threat to shut down the federal government for something that Trump has repeatedly insisted will be paid for by Mexico, and not the United States.

Brooks’ effort to tie himself to Trump is overt: when you play the ad, the message “Help Mo & Trump build the wall” pops up in the corner.

The ad then takes something of an apocalyptic turn.

“We’re going to build that wall, or you’ll know the name of every Republican who surrenders to the Democrats to break my filibuster,” Brooks says, adding “I give you my word, and I don’t give my word lightly.”

Brooks is no stranger to this sort of thing. As a congressman, he’s offered an amendment to ban DACA recipients from serving in the military—he already has plans for how he’d use the downtime. And in 2011, he was filmed saying he would do “anything short of shooting” illegal immigrants.