The campaign released the ad online ahead of Hillary Clinton’s organizing event at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. | AP Photo Clinton takes aim at Trump in N.Y. ad

Hillary Clinton is locked in a contested New York primary with Bernie Sanders — but the first television ad she plans to run here is all about Donald Trump.

The 30-second TV spot that will begin airing ahead of the April 19 primary — a Clinton spokesman said the timing of the ad launch in the expensive New York media market was still to be determined — uses grainy footage from a Trump rally earlier this month were a white supporter sucker-punches an African-American protester.


“When some say we can solve America’s problems by building walls, banning people based on their religion, and turning against each other, well, this is New York. And we know better,” Clinton says while the camera pans over a sign advertising a new Trump hotel that is “coming 2016.”

It is the first ad of the Clinton campaign that singles out Trump and is part of Clinton's New York primary strategy— rallying progressives to her cause by reminding them of Trump's divisive language and of the high stakes of the election.

Campaigning at a brewery in Wisconsin on Monday, Clinton bolstered that message by weighing in on the battery charges brought against Trump's campaign manager after he grabbed a reporter at a campaign event. "Every candidate has to be responsible for what happens in their campaign," Clinton said. "What Donald Trump has been doing over these last months is inciting violent behavior, aggressive behavior that I think is very dangerous and has resulted in attacks on people at his events, including this charge that was brought against his campaign manager. ... Ultimately the responsibility is Mr. Trump's."

Clinton herself doesn’t appear in the ad until the end, but the former senator from New York plays up her hometown status throughout, by talking about New Yorkers as “we.”

“No, we don’t all look the same. We don’t all sound the same, either. But when we pull together, we do the biggest things in the world,” Clinton says, as the ad shows a time-lapse video of the construction of 1 World Trade Center.

The campaign released the ad online ahead of Clinton’s organizing event at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the kickoff of her pre-primary push here. At the event, an aide said, she is expected to echo the same contrasts with Trump, a native New Yorker, that she voices in the ad.

