Yesterday I sat down to watch Ohio State play Illinois, and in the middle of the game a Donald Trump commercial rolled across my screen, a glossy piece of self-worship paid for with your tax dollars and mine. Today I turned on NFL football. The same ad showed up twice.
I wrote about it yesterday in my Substack Notes, and seeing it again made my blood boil all over again. These spots are dark and disturbing, packed with hatred and division, and they carry the stink of a panicked man trying to rescue a midterm election that keeps slipping out of his hands. The White House calls them educational, patriotic public service announcements and points out that they name no candidate and no race. I call it blatant propaganda and you should too.
What Is Airing on Your Television
The first spot hit the air on Wednesday, September 23, on Fox News, and within days it spread to Newsmax, national cable, and broadcast networks including CBS. For 30 seconds, Trump photos and video roll past while a chorus sings “love me” over and over. Trump vows that America will never be a communist country.
Hold that thought. This is the same man who bragged that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un “fell in love” over a stack of beautiful letters, and who has spent years calling Vladimir Putin, a former Soviet KGB officer, his friend. On September 24, one day after the ad first aired, he hosted Xi Jinping, head of the Chinese Communist Party and its roughly 100 million members, for a state dinner in the East Room of the White House. The spot then closes with fellow loser and scrub Dana White, the UFC boss, calling Trump the toughest, most resilient person he has ever met, a line lifted straight from White’s speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention.
Two days later a second ad arrived, a full minute long, built on Mount Rushmore footage and Trump’s promise of a coming golden age. Both end with a small tag reading “Paid for by the U.S. Government.” Ad trackers put spending on the first spot at $14,000 when it debuted and at least $443,000 by Friday, and the true total is likely higher. Read that tag again.
That is a campaign ad with your name on the check.
The Law Draws a Bright Line
For roughly 75 years, Congress has written a ban on federal publicity or propaganda into its spending bills. Section 718 of Division E of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026, the funding law Trump signed in February, forbids using any appropriation, directly or indirectly, including through a private contractor, for publicity or propaganda inside the United States that Congress never authorized. The Government Accountability Office, the watchdog Congress relies on to police federal spending, has long read that ban to reach government messages that are purely partisan or self-aggrandizing. In plain English, that means messages built to help a party or a candidate, or messages built to puff up an official.
Government ads exist to tell you about a real government program, such as how to sign up for a benefit or where to get a flu shot. GAO has not ruled on these ads yet, and even Kevin Kosar, the scholar who wrote the Congressional Research Service report on government advertising and now works at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, looked at this one and called it puffery. Picture your homeowners association treasurer pulling money from the pool repair fund to buy billboards of his own smiling face a few weeks before the board election, and you have the whole scheme in one image.
The label fixes nothing. GAO ties the separate category of covert propaganda to hiding the government’s role, so the tag settles that one question and nothing more, and the ban on partisan, self-promotional government advertising stays fully in force. Slapping a government label on a campaign ad leaves you footing the bill for a political pitch you never agreed to fund.
The Hatch Act adds another layer. It exempts the President and Vice President, which should surprise nobody, and it bars federal employees from using their official authority to affect an election. This administration has been here before, since the Office of Special Counsel found that acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf broke the Hatch Act by staging a naturalization ceremony for the 2020 Republican convention. Under GAO precedent, money spent in violation of the propaganda ban also opens the door to an Antideficiency Act violation, the law that stops agencies from spending money in ways Congress never approved.
A president who spends your tax dollars on his own highlight reel is picking your pocket in broad daylight.
Why You Have Never Seen This Before
Presidents have appeared in government public service announcements for years, urging you to get a vaccine or explaining a Medicare law, and GAO has caught administrations of both parties crossing the line, including George W. Bush’s Medicare news segments in 2004 and an Obama EPA social media campaign in 2015. Each of those tied back to a government program. This one is different. No administration before this one has bought airtime with public money, weeks before a national election, for a montage of the sitting president set to a chorus begging you to love him, and reporters covering the story found no precedent for it.
Moscow and Beijing Wrote This Script
In Russia, state television spends night after night treating Vladimir Putin like a national father figure, broadcasting his speeches and handshakes with loving attention and painting anyone who questions him as a traitor or a tool of foreign enemies. China’s state broadcaster opens its nightly news with Xi Jinping and his accomplishments, day after day, and the Chinese people pay for that worship whether they want it or not.
North Korea takes the formula as far as it goes. Its state broadcaster presents Kim Jong Un as a heroic, almost godlike figure, and public disrespect toward the leader carries severe punishment, including death by firing squad.
That should chill you. Every one of these regimes runs the same basic play, spending public money to glorify the leader and branding his critics as enemies of the nation. Senior House and Senate Democrats reached for the same comparison, calling this ad the kind of propaganda you would expect in North Korea. When a spot paid for by the U.S. Government hints to millions of Americans that the people on the other side are a communist threat, it runs that same play on American soil.
State television belongs in Moscow and Pyongyang, and no American should ever pay for a president’s propaganda during a football game.
Silence at the Top
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson sent the House home on September 16 with full pay and benefits, members are not scheduled to return until after the midterms, and Johnson has said he is able to bring the House back on 48 hours’ notice, a power he has not used to deal with these ads. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has taken no public step to stop them. The Department of Justice has announced nothing. The White House keeps buying airtime.
A few Republicans spoke up. Senator Thom Tillis called the ad inappropriate and compared it to something out of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, and Senator John Kennedy questioned whether it was legal. Their leaders stayed quiet. That silence is a choice.
They Work for Us
These people are federal employees paid with your tax dollars. They do not get to point a finger at half the country and call us communists, and they do not get to tell you that your neighbors are bad people.
Their job is to fix the problems sitting on your kitchen table. They should refund every dollar of the tariffs the Supreme Court ruled illegal in February and stop using tariffs that drive up your prices, and they should end the Iran war that Trump launched alongside Israel on February 28 without authorization from Congress, without good reason and without any designated outcome.
They should put policies in place that lower the cost of filling your tank, whether it runs on gasoline or diesel, and lower the cost of filling your refrigerator, so a family in Ohio stops dreading every trip to the gas station and the grocery store. They should help American farmers and manufacturers bring their costs down, and they should lower health insurance premiums and bring health care to every American.
Their energy goes into ballrooms and monuments. They spend the rest of their time trying to stamp the name of a convicted felon and civilly adjudicated sexual abuser on buildings across Washington, D.C., including the Kennedy Center, where a federal judge has already ordered his name taken down.
November Is Your Turn
This fight comes down to you and your vote in November. When Americans take back majority control of Congress, we get real oversight back, along with control of the purse strings, subpoena power to put officials under oath, and a working separation of powers that keeps democracy alive. When this happens, Trump will become a lame-duck president for the remainder of his term, and his enablers will lose a substantial amount of their power. Everything changes. My personal prediction is that he will resign in 2027.
No president and no party should ever again spend your money telling you who to vote for.
Call the Capitol switchboard today, tomorrow and every day this week at (202) 224-3121, ask for your representative and your senators, and demand these commercials come off the air. The House is home until after the election, but call anyway, tell whoever picks up exactly how disgusted you are, and if a machine answers, leave your disapproval and anger on the recording so the whole office hears it the moment someone walks back in the door.
The commercials and this entire shit show end when you walk into that voting booth in November and take your government back.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
I was watching the game and there it was. I was immediately enraged about MY tax dollars going to this criminal.
Whinging is fun but solves nothing. Have a plan to get to a polling both in November. Vote every Republican OUT. Even the dogcatcher.