Donald Trump has found a new way to spend your money on himself. This weekend, the White House rolled out its latest government-paid “public service announcement,” and this one doesn’t bother pretending to be something other than a campaign ad, because, well, it is one. The spot is a near-exact copy of a 2024 Trump campaign ad — Trump striding down a hallway, calling on viewers to join his fight to “expel the warmongers from our government” (the irony is on overload with the man who started a war with Iran) with the old campaign logo trimmed off the end and “Paid for by the U.S. government” slapped on instead. It aired during college football, NFL games, and “Fox News Sunday,” a few weeks before the midterms.
Richard Painter, George W. Bush’s chief White House ethics lawyer, so not a guy who arrived at the resistance by birth, did not mince words, writing on X, “this could be an impeachable offense. @POTUS has no right to use taxpayer money for campaign ads. Congress has expressly prohibited government sponsored political propaganda, which is dangerous for democracy.”
Painter is not alone in his assessment. “The president and his administration have gone from breaking the law to trampling it,” Norm Eisen, who did the ethics job in Barack Obama’s White House and has sued the Trump administration several times, told the New York Times. “The prior ad was bad enough, but this one openly repurposes prior political conduct.” Margaret Dylus-Yukins, senior legal counsel for ethics at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, was just as blunt, “A divisive campaign commercial paid for by the U.S. government defies the Hatch Act’s very purpose.”
So what does the White House have to say for itself? On Friday, it published a defense with the extremely confident title “Presidential Public Service Announcements Are Nothing New.” The argument goes like this: these can’t be campaign ads because Trump isn’t on the ballot and there’s no call to action, and anyway, Bush did it, Obama did it, Biden did it, and so did Woodrow Wilson and FDR.
Let’s take those in order. Trump isn’t on the ballot, except that he’s told voters to “pretend” he is. There’s no call to action, except that the new ad asks viewers to join his fight. And Wilson and FDR were selling world wars, which is a different vibe from a midterm cycle.
To use the technical term, the defense is weak-ass shit.
The White House leads with the Bush administration’s campaign selling the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law to seniors. Well… about that. In 2004, the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) found the Bush administration violated the federal appropriations law against propaganda with that very Medicare push. Painter told the Times:
“They really shouldn’t have done it the way they did,” Mr. Painter said, referring to the Bush administration ad, which aired before he joined the White House. “Even though it’s nowhere near as bad as this. Nowhere near.”
So the White House’s leading example of how normal all this is turns out to be a campaign the government’s auditors called illegal. Cool, great, very airtight.
This administration treats the Hatch Act as a suggestion. Earlier this month, the Attorney General spoke at a Republican midterm rally, and the DOJ waved it off. It has also shown it’s perfectly comfortable treating taxpayer money as a fund for Trump’s friends. The Times, citing AdImpact, estimates the government has spent more than $1 million on pro-Trump ads in just the last several days. Trump has a super PAC sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars, but why spend his money when he can spend yours?
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1
