The fine print did it.
In January 2024, Donald Trump posted a campaign ad to Truth Social. Black and white. Trump walks a long hallway while his own voice promises the final battle. He will demolish the deep state. He will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. He will throw off the sick political class. The last six seconds carried his campaign logo and a number to text. His campaign ran it, which is how campaigns work in the United States, for now.
On September 27, the White House aired the same ad during Sunday football, nearly frame for frame. The White House stripped the campaign logo. In its place, in the small type nobody reads, a new line credits the bill to the government of the United States. You paid for it. So did the nurse in Tampa, the retiree in Española, and the kid who just got his first paycheck and wondered where the federal withholding went. Now he knows. It bought a commercial break in the Seahawks game.
That ad is the third. An earlier one set Trump's voice, vowing to defeat communism, to a song called "Love Me." I would not make that up. I couldn't sell it. AdImpact, which tracks political ad spending, puts the public tab above $1.7 million so far. The White House won't say which account paid. When an administration can't name the budget line behind the president's commercials, the silence answers the question.
The ads, say the White House, are public service announcements. "President Trump is not on the ballot, and there is no call to action," it wrote. A spokesman added the spots remind people to love their country.
Take those one at a time.
Trump is not on the ballot. On September 9, at his party's first midterm convention in Dallas, Trump asked voters to "pretend that I'm on the ballot." Every House seat and a third of the Senate go before voters in five weeks, with his approval near the bottom of his second term and his party trailing on the generic ballot. The ads don't need his name on the ballot. They need his face on the screen and the word "battle" in your ear before you vote. He told you so himself, from a podium, in Dallas.
No call to action. The call to action existed. It ran six seconds, it told viewers to text TRUMP to 88022, and the White House cut it before the ad went to air. That edit is the confession. You don't remove the thing you swear isn't there.
Love your country. Fine. Which part? The ad doesn't show a national park, a Social Security office, or a veterans hospital. It shows Trump walking down a hallway. The country it asks you to love has one face, and you've seen that face on a gold statue, a meme coin, and a row of plaques along the White House colonnade mocking some of the men who held the job before him. The ad calls that face the country and bills the country for the airtime. The White House boasts the spots are "clearly disclosed." They are. The disclaimer is the only honest frame in the ad.
The White House points to precedent: past spots on Medicare drug coverage, the insurance exchanges, the COVID vaccine. Those ads told you how to use something you had already paid for. This one tells you whom to adore. Walter Olson of the Cato Institute, a libertarian shop with no affection for Democrats, called the ads a "gross violation of democratic norms." Congress has barred federal money for publicity and propaganda for decades, and the Government Accountability Office caught the Bush administration breaking that ban in 2005, when the Education Department paid a commentator to promote No Child Left Behind without telling his audience. Nobody in the Bush White House picked the footage of himself. The White House will say its disclaimer cures the problem. It cures the secrecy. The ban also covers self-aggrandizement and purely partisan messaging, and a president's face promising a final battle before a midterm is both.
Trump picked his. A source told CNN the president personally drove these ads and helped choose the imagery. The White House video team built them in-house. The candidate directed the campaign ad, the government produced it, and you bought the airtime. Fox sold some of it: one spot ran during Saturday college football and again on Fox News Sunday.
Republicans noticed. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he liked the message but taxpayers shouldn't pay for it. John Cornyn said it wasn't even a close question. John Kennedy of Louisiana said no public official should spend public money on private ads for themselves. Thomas Massie called it completely legal in banana republics. Thom Tillis said it felt like Viktor Orbán talking to the Hungarian people.
Good lines, all of them. Now check who said them. Cornyn lost his primary to Ken Paxton. Massie lost his to a Trump-endorsed challenger. Tillis, after years of Trump calling him a loser and a quitter, leaves the Senate in January. Kennedy aside, the sharpest objections came from men Trump has already finished with.
The one man on the list with power is the one who liked the message. Thune runs the Senate, and the Senate writes appropriations. One rider in the next funding bill, barring any federal dollar from buying airtime for the president's face, would end this. Thune doesn't need an opinion about the message. He needs a vote. He hasn't called one. His quote does the same job the ads do. It tells voters the party holds the right feelings while the money keeps moving.
Tillis picked the right comparison, and he should finish the thought. Orbán didn't take Hungary with tanks. He took it with a budget. State money flowed to friendly media, the government ran party ads and called them "information campaigns," and after enough years nobody could find the seam between the ruling party and the state. Vladimir Putin runs the same system with less subtlety, a state television machine whose chief product is the man in charge. Moscow wrote the manual. Budapest field-tested it. PrumpTutin is running it here, one media buy at a time.
The precedent matters more than the money. The $1.7 million comes to about half of what the Government Accountability Office says a single Mar-a-Lago trip cost taxpayers in Trump's first term. The damage comes next. If this stands, every president who follows inherits a government campaigning for itself on the public's dime and calls it patriotism. Some of them will belong to the other party, and the Republicans cheering now will discover the law they never demanded. Every power you hand a man you like sits in the drawer, waiting for the man you don't.
Orbán is a former prime minister now. In April, Hungarians turned out at a record 78 percent and threw him out. It took them 16 years to read the fine print. That's the one piece of the Budapest model Trump never imported, and nobody can import it for you.
Five weeks. Read the small type.
Also from Burnt Ground
▪ Losing Works Fine, the court knocked down one flank of the election plan, and the head is still running
▪ The Corrupt Leading the Blind, takeovers do not need tanks, they need personnel departments
▪ Fools and Power, they give up power to keep it
▪ Tickets to the Decline, we are the same age, and only one of us threw a party
My books, from Arrakis Publishing
▪ PrumpTutin, how Trump sold the West
▪ The Art of the Lie, Roy Cohn to Roger Ailes, how deception became entertainment
Full catalog: arrakispublishing.com