A trio of taxpayer-funded TV ads featuring President Donald Trump, released just weeks before the November midterm elections, have drawn bipartisan backlash. One advertisement, which features black-and-white video of Trump vowing to “demolish the deep state” and “throw off the sick political class that hates our country,” aired over the weekend during Fox News Sunday, Saturday Night Live, and multiple college and NFL football games, according to The New York Times.
The spot is virtually identical to a campaign commercial for Trump’s Republican reelection campaign that aired in 2024—save for the final six seconds, which then included Trump’s campaign logo and a number to text. On the White House–funded ad, the words “Paid for by the US Government” are shown onscreen, and it’s that distinction that has got both Republican and Democrat lawmakers balking.
“This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America,” congressional Democratic appropriators wrote in a letter to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles on Friday, “and it is an egregious and illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars.”
A White House official tells Vanity Fair that “the PSAs are clearly not political,” noting that “the president is not on the ballot, and the ads don’t have a call to action.” The White House has also compared the ads to previous administrations running public service announcements about Medicare, Obamacare and promoting COVID-19 vaccination.
When reached by VF for comment, a White House spokesperson said: “These public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad. The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic. We should be proud of our country.”
But members of Trump’s own party have also criticized the ads, the second of which features footage of Trump at Mount Rushmore, lauding the “beginning of the golden age of America.” GOP Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky called the black-and-white ad “ominous” on social media, writing: “Don’t worry, using taxpayer dollars to run ominous campaign ads of the President has been done before and is completely legal… in banana republics.”
Meanwhile, Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, said that no public official should spend public money to promote themselves. “I also think that we ought to have a rule that no politician can have a building named after him while he’s alive,” he went on to say in an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation over the weekend while discussing an earlier government-funded ad. “I think that would settle a lot of this controversy.”
In the first of the three ads, which began airing on Wednesday, Trump denounces communism while text appears onscreen boasting “largest tax cuts in history.” Red letters read: “reigniting American manufacturing” and “defend law and order and police.” A supercut of Trump’s presidencies is soundtracked by the song “Love Me” by JMSN—an Albanian American musician who “would never authorize my music to be used for ANY political agenda or campaign,” he wrote on social media. That ad culminates in UFC CEO Dana White hailing Trump as the “toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met.”
