Trump Is Using Your Taxpayer Money to Pay for Illegal Election Propaganda

This just in: You are paying for the rollout of the GOP’s midterm messaging from the White House. A trio of election-season spots casting President Donald Trump as the savior of a communist-besieged America and the defender of its libertarian birthright hit the airwaves recently, once more splattering the commander in chief’s visage across the great and good republic of television. But instead of running with the standard funding disclaimer supplied by a dummy super PAC, these ads fade away under a screen legend that reads “paid for by the US government.”

The ads are clear violations of appropriations law prohibiting the federal government from spending money for “publicity or propaganda purposes.” Maryland Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, also argued in a post on X that the White House ad offensive “may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes,” in addition to violating the Hatch Act, which forbids government officials from electioneering on federal property. As is now the norm for reports on Trump administration criminality, the White House responded with glorified social-media trolling. In response to press queries about the initial spot that first aired last Wednesday, which features Trump delivering a McCarthyite tirade about the yoked menaces of socialism and communism, over a chorus of the JMSN song “Love Me,” White House flacks claimed, farcically, that it was part of a series of “public service announcements” designed to whip up patriotic fervor. “The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic,” a White House spokesperson whinged in a trademark quasi-bullying flourish. “We should be proud of our country.”

In other words, the Trump administration seeks to dismiss charges that it’s engaging in illegal propaganda by engaging in more propaganda. What’s more, its ostensible message of national pride is distinctly undercut by Trump’s unhinged invocation of the phantom menace of a threatened communist takeover of the country, aired against rapid-cut footage of him at rallies and campaign events: The overriding message here isn’t patriotism but militant paranoia. The spot culminates in the imperial imagery of military aircraft flying overhead as UFC chief executive Dana White praises the president as “the toughest, most resilient person I’ve ever met, and nothing is going to stop him from fighting for the country he loves so much.” Amid all of this command-and-control footage, the only salient patriotic sentiment is that ascribed to the country’s maximum leader. Far from schooling American citizens in the love of country, the spot harps on the central message of the soundtrack: “Love Me.” (JMSN, for his part, has threatened legal action in his own social-media response to the ad, writing that “the President illegally use[d] the song without asking.”)

In its second spot, the White House notionally sought to establish a more conventional civic backdrop, featuring Trump delivering his remarks commemorating the nation’s semiquincentennial anniversary at Mt. Rushmore. There’s much boilerplate invocation of the country’s heritage of liberty, but here, too, the main takeaway is the central theme of Trump’s 2024 campaign: “This is the beginning of the Golden Age in America.” It’s also noteworthy that the 2026 Mt. Rushmore address marked the introduction of Trump and the GOP’s red-baiting midterms crusade, with the president announcing, in pure hallucinatory fashion, that “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.” (Trump had also used the same setting to publicize the alleged runaway threat of “left-wing cultural revolution” during yet another July 4 address at the height of the Black Lives Matter uprising, again deploying the symbolism of patriotic belonging to unleash a barrage of propagandistic persecution fantasies. For all his manifest cognitive shortcomings, the guy never deviates from his prefab frighten-the-horses talking points.) There’s little doubt that the hardcore legion of MAGA faithful targeted by these appeals, which began running on the ultra-MAGA network Newsmax, would immediately pick up on these visual callouts to Trump’s lurches into Roy Cohn–branded demagogy.

In any event, the third installation in these publicly funded pieces of MAGA agitprop definitely lays to rest all the empty blather about their serving as PSAs. This one is a modified version of a 2024 campaign pitch that Trump had posted in real time on his Truth Social account. “This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government,” Trump threatens with zero self-awareness over grainy black-and-white footage of him striding purposefully through the “Presidential Walk of Fame” he installed in the White House’s West Wing Colonnade. “We will drive out the globalists, cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

Not exactly the stuff of a State Department filmstrip produced for anodyne consumption in middle-school civics classes—or even a vintage Cold War Voice of America broadcast. These taxpayer-funded spots are a clear expression of the prime directive Trump declared to the crowd at his midterm convention in Dallas earlier this month: “Pretend like I’m on the ballot.” And that’s why, as brazenly illegal and authoritarian as the provenance of these spots are, they seem likely to backfire. Trump is now stupendously unpopular, with inflation, his war in Iran, his callous indifference to the financial plight of working Americans, his rampant kleptocratic self-dealing, and his clueless protectionist manipulation of the nation’s supply chain all plunging him toward the lowest depths in presidential approval polling plumbed during the last days of George W. Bush’s disastrous second term. The real messaging behind these high-paranoid vindications of his maximal power are equivalent to his thuggish efforts to force the runaway buildout of AI data centers on the heartland redoubts of MAGA Nation: You’ll take whatever plutocratic bullshit flits across my brainpan and like it—if you know what’s good for you.

Indeed, the White House’s brazen Pravda-style adoption of this televisual campaign to remind the MAGA faithful that Trump is, and always has been, their designated savior is actually a sign of political weakness—a telltale admission that this fundamental Trumpian pitch isn’t landing as it used to with the party’s base. Politico reports that even the diehard MAGA “Joes”—the Trump superfans who trek across the country to be seen in the front row at his rallies and official events—are decidedly souring on the man’s governing record. Trisha Hope, a Joe who fell so hard for Trump the first time out that she published a book with the sadly self-explanatory title Just the Tweets, and used the proceeds from its sales to fund her front-row cheerleading expeditions, now calls Trump “a fraud and a liar.” Citing his serial failures to come clean on the Jeffrey Epstein papers as well as the war in Iran, she says, “If we do lose the midterms and he is impeached again, I will be walking the halls of Congress in support of that impeachment.” Rick Frazier, one of the founding Joes, expresses the same sense of disenchantment. “Epstein crimes and feeding the industrial military complex…those are big noes for me,” he says. “I’m to the point of not going to the polls in November.” If that sentiment is creeping into the front row of Trump rallies, all the alarmist commie-baiting propaganda in the world isn’t going to dispel the spread of similar misgivings in the back of the room.

Between the reemergence of right-wing red-baiting and Donald Trump’s use of the chilling National Security Presidential Memorandum–7 to criminalize left political organizing, we’re seeing McCarthyism reborn before our eyes.

This assault on democracy cannot be ignored or wished away. Resisting it requires bravery in the face of threats and repression, a steadfast commitment to the truth, and the unwavering belief that we can—and will—overcome this darkness.

We must have an independent media that sets the record straight, unearths corruption and abuses of power, and advances a politics of justice and dignity for all if we’re to win this fight.

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Onward,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation

Chris Lehmann

Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nationand a contributing editor atThe Baffler.He was formerly editor ofTheBafflerandThe New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream(Melville House, 2016).