Last month, as reported here, Trump’s re-election campaign sent out so-called “cease and desist” orders to try to force television stations to stop airing the 30-second ad, below.

The ad, prepared by Priorities USA, simply uses clips of Trump’s own words to illustrate just how many times he lied to the American public about the severity of the COVID-19 threat. We now know that these statements were not simply wishful thinking, but that Trump was fully aware these were lies at the time. Nevertheless he continued to spew them, providing a false sense of security and hope to Americans and doubtlessly encouraging many to risk their health and lives, even as the casualty rate from the coronavirus leaped into the thousands (The number of Americans killed by the virus is now somewhere north of 22000, and rising daily).

The Trump campaign has now taken the highly unusual step of suing a small Wisconsin TV station for airing the ad. The suit is objectively meritless according to legal analysts. Dave Heller of the Media Law Resource Center was interviewed by TalkingPointsMemo reporter Matt Shuham, who says it would be difficult for the Trump campaign to make its case if the matter actually goes to trial.

“Obviously, broadcasters and news publishers try as best they can to point out when the candidates are not being truthful or are saying false statements,” Heller said. “But that’s a far different proposition from saying, ‘Oh, well, you broadcast something that may be false, therefore you’re responsible for defamation damages.'”

However, much in the same way powerful organizations use costly lawsuits as a means of intimidating and stifling bad publicity and dissent, the Trump campaign’s suit may have a “chilling” effect on free speech, of which political advertising is among the most highly protected forms. As reported by TPM, the station itself appears to have been selected with no rationale other than the fact that it is in the key swing state of Wisconsin.

“Why they selected my little station in Northern Wisconsin, I have no idea,” Rockfleet Broadcasting President R. Joseph Fuchs told TPM on the phone Monday.

As reported by Shuham, the suit against WJFW, a relatively small station broadcasting into Trump-friendly areas of the state, has all the hallmarks of an intimidation tactic by a campaign apparatus clearly fearful of what the ad conveys to Trump’s base of support. Heller, speaking to TPM, likened the tactic to a “shot across the bow to other local television stations” by suing WJFW rather than the super PAC that paid to air the ad.

“It’s really a very risky area to go into, to be asking courts to subject every statement back-and-forth between candidates to the standards of a defamation suit,” Heller said.

Of course when you initiate a lawsuit like this you should expect that the high profile you’re affording the ad itself will cause it to be viewed more than ever. So assuming the Trump campaign has decent lawyers (not necessarily a sure thing) you can assume those lawyers weighed that eventuality against the intended “chilling effect” it would have. And yet they persisted in the lawsuit, in a must-win area for Trump. That suggests real alarm.

So what is it about this ad, specifically, that gets under the Trump organization’s skin? On its face its a pretty simple ad. But what does it do that’s so scary to Trump?

The immediate impression is that the ad contains no commentary or messaging other than Trump’s own words and an alarming graph that ticks off with increasing speed (almost like a heartbeat entering tachycardia), as the graph tracks upward. The viewer knows what’s going on in the ad—nothing is contrived, and the snippets are actually on point to the subject. So there isn’t the suspicion by the viewer of being lied to.

Perhaps most important to the Trump campaign, however, is the substance of those snippets. The recordings of Trump’s own words directly contradicts the overall strategy that the Trump campaign shifted to when it became apparent that it could not “bluff” its way through this pandemic crisis by minimizing it. So administration officials, aided by their collaborators on Fox News, immediately began praising the alleged “efficiency” of Trump’s actions, going so far as to ignore his prior malignant disregard of American lives, and recasting Trump’s response as quick and decisive.

This ad blows a huge hole in that strategy and has the added quality of being terse and memorable. As the body count increases, people’s minds will go back to this ad. As people’s friends and relatives across states like Wisconsin begin to feel the full impact of the pandemic, this ad will stick in their minds. They will associate Trump with those casualty counts as they increase.

The ad is simple and doesn’t presume to tell people what to think—it just provides a running account of what Trump did and said during the critical period when the virus could have been contained, right down to his denial of responsibility, highlighted in more vivid color at the end. That makes it more appealing than an ad with some grim-voiced narrator intoning about how bad a candidate is.

It also incorporates everything the press is generally afraid to say to challenge Trump at his daily propaganda briefings, for fear of losing access or “becoming the story” themselves.

So Trump does the only thing he knows how to do in such a circumstance. He tries to intimidate his critics into silence. He sues. Because having his words and actions thrown back at him is something he’s simply incapable of coping with. But the target of the lawsuit itself suggests that the Trump campaign is genuinely fearful of its effectiveness.

The folks who put this ad together really have Trump’s number.