What did Donald Trump do today?
He doubled down on forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for his own campaign ads.
On Thursday, the federal government paid for a "public service announcement" featuring images of Trump over music that chanted "love me, love me, I'll make them love me" and lavish praise from one of his political benefactors. It is a violation of several federal laws, including the Hatch Act, to use public money for partisan propaganda.
Today, Trump took things a step further, this time using federal funds to re-run one of his actual 2024 campaign ads. Asked for comment, the White House responded by claiming that the ad was "reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad."
Democrats were incensed, and many Republicans joined in the criticism. It's not the first time the Trump administration has done this: taxpayers also footed the bill for $220 million worth of ads for former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. (Trump fired Noem shortly afterwards—not because of the ads themselves, but reportedly because of his concerns that she was upstaging him.)
By government standards, the amounts Trump has used to run vanity ads for himself isn't much yet: roughly $1,000,000 so far. But there's no reason to think Trump will stop there. In recent months, he's become increasingly manic over his supposed importance to the 2026 midterm elections, even as Republican candidates are scrubbing his face from their websites and sending him to "campaign" in ultra-safe districts where the Republican incumbents won by more than 50 points in the last cycle.
Why does this matter?
- State-funded propaganda is what dictatorial regimes do to prop up the leader.
- It's bad if the governing philosophy of the President of the United States is "what can I get away with and who's going to stop me?"