The White House calls them patriotic PSAs. Critics call them illegal campaign ads.
Taxpayer Cash Funding Trump’s Latest Ads
White House|YouTube
A screengrab from The White House YouTube channel.
In American politics, presidential public service announcements have encouraged Americans to get their COVID-19 vaccines, raised awareness of sexual assault or promoted volunteerism in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
With less than 40 days before the midterm elections, President Donald Trump has premiered a very different kind of PSA message: “Love me.”
Those are the JMSN lyrics you can hear in the background of a recently aired 30-second television ad that looks and sounds very much like a campaign commercial but is labeled “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
In case the sharp break with precedent wasn’t obvious enough, Trump followed up that ad with another taxpayer-funded spot that, as New York Times reporter Bayliss Wagner noted, was a repurposed ad he ran in early 2024 when he was running for president.
“We will demolish the deep state, expel the warmongers from our government,” Trump says in the ad. “We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media."
There’s a third one that features clips from a Trump speech at Mount Rushmore.
In its response, the White House has insisted the spots “are very clearly not campaign ads,” noted that Trump is not on the ballot and underlined that there is no “call to action” – meaning no explicit call on viewers to vote for Republicans.
So even though they recycle a central GOP message – that Democrats are “communists” who must be defeated – the administration said that makes the ads “public service announcements.”
The White House defense characterized the ads as “a reminder for Americans to love their country and know why it’s worth defending – at home, at the border, and abroad” and “aimed at the country — not a line on the ballot.”
The Pushback
Democrats were quick to denounce the videos.
“If President Trump wants people to love him, he can pay for it himself,” leading Democratic congressional appropriators wrote last week to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
“This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America, and it is an egregious and illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars,” they said.
But it hasn’t just been Democrats.
Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana expressed unease about the ads on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. The senator managed to append a reference to an AI-generated video the president shared of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero and a dig at Trump’s efforts to put his name on the Kennedy Center.
“I don't think any public official, including President Trump or Kristi Noem or John Kennedy, should spend public money on private ads for themselves,” he said. “I may end up with a sombrero on my head, but I also think that we ought to have a rule that no politician can have a building named after him while he's alive. I think that would settle a lot of this controversy.”
Kennedy had scolded former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem over a $220 million ad campaign he said was about boosting her “name recognition.”
Some History
Trump is not the first president to test the boundaries between PSA and political self-aggrandizement on the taxpayer dime. Think of every construction site with a sign praising the sitting president for paying for it. Or the lavishly produced White House events that serve mostly to elevate the president.
I regularly surprise even experienced observers of politics by noting that the church-and-state divide between partisan politics and official functions has been porous before. President Ronald Reagan announced his reelection campaign from the Oval Office; President Jimmy Carter filmed an ad behind the Resolute Desk as well. Presumably, federal dollars kept the lights on in those ads, even if they were not made by on-the-clock federal staff, which would violate federal law.
But this tests the system more seriously. If Trump successfully erases the taboo on using taxpayer funds for what looks like a political ad campaign, what’s to keep future presidents from using taxpayer money to fund constant commercial blitzes?
The White House insists this is about patriotism. But it’s also about power.
And right now, Trump has the power to air what he wants – with no obvious way to stop him. At least through the midterms.
Tags: elections, Donald Trump
