Chloe Tripp

English 002
December 14, 2016
Formal Writing Assignment 2
During election time, you cannot turn on the television or the radio without hearing a
political campaign advertisement. These advertisements are both meant to inform and to
persuade. The advertisement wants to inform the audience about the platforms of the candidate
and what they will change; these advertisements also want to persuade the audience into not
voting for the other candidate either by exposing the negatives of the other candidates, how their
platforms are different, or even by using ad hominem arguments tearing down the other
candidates personally.
"Mirrors" is a political advertisement by the Hillary Clinton campaign that has been on
television during this election cycle. Hillary attempts to argue why Donald Trump should not or
rather cannot be president. The advertisement contains first a quick clip of Hillary Clinton
hugging a young girl and then merged into a serious clips of young girls looking at themselves in
mirrors or cameras. During the scenes of the young girls there are clips and sound bites of
Donald Trump saying derogatory things about women during his career over the years. This
advertisement is able to provide a strong argument as to why Donald Trump should not be
president, and in turn why she should.
This advertisement mainly uses an appeal of pathos, emotional appeal, to connect with its
audience. By using clips of young girls looking sadly at themselves in the mirrors attempts to
make its targeted audience, which is mainly women but especially mothers of daughters, become
emotional and become invested in the commercial. The advertisement sympathizes with mothers

because no mom would want a man talking about her daughter that way or for their daughter to
feel not beautiful or not intelligent because a powerful man said so. The advertisement also uses
the appeal of ethos, ethics, to simply state that Donald Trump is not an ethical person because he
has said statements like "fat ugly face", "it is hard for a person who is flat chested to be a 10" and
"she ate like a pig". Therefore since Donald Trump is not an ethical person, he is not fit to be
president because a president should be ethical.
Although this advertisement is emotionally strong, which gives it argument strength with
the audience, it does contain some logical fallacies. One logical fallacy being the Ad Hominem
which is attacking the opponent rather than the opponents argument (Cavender, Kahane pg 75).
The advertisement attacks Donald Trump on a personal level and does not mention anything
about his arguments or his policies or any logical reasons why he should not be president.
The advertisement also uses the logical fallacy of Hasty Conclusions, which is committed
when we draw a conclusion from relevant but insufficient evidence (Cavender, Kahane pg 95).
Although you could argue that Donald Trump does not appear to be a "good guy" in the eyes of
society, based off his personal beliefs or past comments, this not a good enough reason or
sufficient enough reasoning as to why he should not be president or why he would do a poor job
at being president.
This advertisement sheds light on how our country is still struggling with equality when it
comes to gender and gender roles. I cant help but to wonder how this inequality affects our
current political system, especially with the focus on Donald Trump and the derogatory things he
has said about specific women, including his opponent Hillary Clinton. A study found that the
gender of the people running in an election influenced newspaper articles about the candidates
and what these newspaper articles focused on. This study showed that there was a difference in

the focus on character traits or political issues based off of the candidates gender, with the study
stating: When only male candidates were running, stories focused on character traits six
percent of the time and political issues 55.5 percent of the time. When only female candidates
were running, the stories focused on character traits 9.4 percent of the time and political issues
51.7 percent of the time (Bahadur). Obviously there has been a problem for some time on the
equality in politics for women. It appears that women are taken less seriously than men because
the media would rather focus on the womens personal life than their stances on political issues.
Instead of reporting coverage on a woman politicians economic policy, they would rather focus
on what she wears and whether or not she has a good relationship with her husband. This
campaign advertisement not only sends the message on how some men, like Donald Trump, view
women, but also can send an underlying or implicit message on how women are treated in
general in todays society, especially women in power.
Overall, I would say that this argument does exactly what it intended to do, to persuade.
By using such a strong emotional rhetorical appeal, this advertisement is able to captivate a large
audience and convince them that Donald Trump is not a good candidate for the presidency
without having to use many claims or much evidence. Although the argument does contain
logical fallacies, they appear to work in favor for this type of advertisement.

Works Cited
Bahadur, Nina. "Women In Politics: Coverage Focuses More On Personality Traits, Less On
Issues, Study Finds." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 8 July 2013. Web. 18 Oct.
2016.
Kahane,Howard, and Nancy Cavender. "Kinds of Background Beliefs." Logic and
Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reason in Everyday Life. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth,
2014. Print.