If you saw the television ad that aired Sunday during an NFL game, it may have looked familiar.
The ad was a carbon copy of a 2024 campaign video from President Donald Trump touting the “final battle” against “communists” and “warmongers.”
But there was one important difference. This time, the ad was not paid for by the Trump campaign or a political action committee. At the very end, a disclaimer identified its sponsor: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
The ad is just the latest in a series of taxpayer-funded commercials that the Trump administration has rolled out over the past week, saying they are “public service announcements.”
But even congressional Republicans are expressing concern that the ads may violate the laws governing PSAs.
“It’s a great message. I like the message,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters on Monday. “But it shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars.”
Retiring Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., was even blunter: “I hate it.”
“It feels like Viktor Orbán talking to the Hungarian people,” Tillis said. “You want to run that ad? We got plenty of resources. The ads didn’t cost that much.”
Tillis said the commercial “didn’t make sense to me,” citing the content of the ad and how it was paid for.
“If it were, you know, some clear message that was going to appeal to the broader — a real public service announcement, that’s fine. But that was not that,” Tillis said. “It’s like we’re fighting communism just after we met with the leader of the communist world.”
He added that “none of it made sense” to him, but what made the least sense to him was paying for the ad with taxpayer dollars.
Even Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., typically a Trump defender, took issue with the ads.
“It’s not something that I would’ve done,” he told MS NOW.
As of Wednesday, Trump has narrated three television advertisements — paid for by the federal government — that have aired in major media markets.
In the most recent one, which ran on Sunday, Trump said, “We will liberate America from these villains once and for all,” referring to the “deep state”, “warmongers,” “globalists,” “communists,” “marxists,” “fascists,” the “sick political class” and “the fake news media.”
In another one, Trump said that “this is only the beginning of the golden age of America.” The third spot featured Trump saying that “America will never be a communist country,” and UFC CEO Dana White saying that Trump is “the toughest, most resilient person I’ve ever met and nothing is gonna stop him from fighting so hard for the country he loves.” The song “Love Me” is playing in the background.
All three ads end with the same disclaimer: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
The White House has defended the advertisements, insisting they’re public service announcements while saying that other administrations have published similar material.
“Don’t let the Fake News get away with their lies about our epic Public Service Announcements that have been running on tv,” White House communications director Steven Cheung wrote on X.
But no administration has been nearly as brazen as Trump’s White House. The president has literally recycled one campaign ad, while the other commercials feature similar themes and imagery.
Further complicating the line between public information and political messaging, the ads conspicuously come just weeks before the midterm elections.
Of course, some Republicans pleaded ignorance about the ads, insisting they hadn’t seen them — including the most recent one that aired during “Fox News Sunday,” “Saturday Night Live” and a number of football games.
Sens. John Hoeven, R-N.D., and John Curtis, R-Utah, both said they had missed the commercials.
“I don’t know it’s a political ad because I haven’t seen it,” Curtis said.
But not seeing the ad didn’t stop everyone from declining to comment. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, disclosed that he also hadn’t seen the commercials, but he said reading about them was enough for him to draw a conclusion.
“We all know you’re not supposed to use taxpayer money for that purpose,” Cornyn said.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., also said she wouldn’t run ads like that, but because she hadn’t actually seen them, “that’s about all I can say.”
“From all the hubbub about it, I think probably money’s better spent doing other things,” she said.
There were, however, some Republicans defending the president. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., insisted to reporters that Trump is “not the first president who’s done this,” even though Trump is certainly the first president to recycle a campaign ad and use taxpayer dollars to run it as a public service announcement.
Democrats, for their part, went beyond expressing concern; they were taking action.
Sen. Patty Murray of Washington — the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee — and Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin demanding an accounting for the ads and how they are being funded, calling the use of government dollars to air “political ads” both “illegal and a shockingly corrupt misuse of taxpayer dollars.”
“It’s hard to imagine a more damning split screen: while President Trump illegally cuts funding for lifesaving health research, he is also illegally using Americans’ tax dollars to fund government propaganda and to put ads from his 2024 campaign back on the air,” they wrote.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., separately told MS NOW that the ads are an “abomination.”
“These vicious, partisan ads, based on falsity, and absolutely a disgrace, should never have been paid by the taxpayer money,” Blumenthal said, adding that the “president’s using his power, once again, illegally. He needs to be held accountable.”
And Murphy offered a warning about the potentially dangerous precedent.
“If this is the new rule,” he said, “then every future president is just going to run their political campaigns using taxpayer money.”
When Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., tried to pass a resolution by unanimous consent on Tuesday stating that taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for Trump’s promotional ads, Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., swiftly objected.
“The message at the heart of these PSAs is a simple one: American values are worth defending against the failed ideologies of communism and socialism,” Lummis said on the Senate floor. “If that is what has the senator from New Hampshire concerned, I’d suggest the concern says more about her side of the aisle than it does about the PSA.”
The post ‘I hate it’: Republicans call out Trump for his taxpayer-funded campaign ads appeared first on MS NOW.
