The White House spent Sunday’s NFL broadcasts airing a black-and-white Donald Trump promising “a final battle,” and the defense it is offering answers a legal question nobody asked.
Here is what is established:
- The 30-second spot shows Trump striding down a portrait-lined hallway vowing to “cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists” and to “rout the fake news media,” then ends on the line “Paid for by the U.S. Government,” as NBC News reported.
- It is nearly a copy of a 2024 Trump campaign ad, a point the Associated Press put in its headline.
- AdImpact figures cited by TIME put it above $362,000 so far, on top of more than $920,000 for last week’s “Love Me” spot.
- Republicans John Kennedy, Thom Tillis and Thomas Massie have objected, alongside a long list of Democrats.
The Wrong Test
The White House line, relayed to NBC by an official, is this:
“The PSAs are clearly not political. The president is not on the ballot, and the ads don’t have a call to action.”
That is a campaign-finance argument. “On the ballot” and “call to action” are how the FEC separates electioneering from issue ads. The law that actually governs this spot is different. Every appropriations bill since the 1950s bars federal money for “publicity or propaganda,” and the Government Accountability Office reads that to cover material that is purely partisan, covert, or self-aggrandizing. CNN’s analysis notes the complaint centers on Section 718 of Division E of this year’s funding law, which Trump signed.
The disclaimer helps him on one prong only. When GAO found in 2015 that the EPA had broken the propaganda ban, the problem was a Thunderclap campaign that hid the agency’s authorship. This ad hides nothing. It fails the other two prongs in the open. A president narrating his own war on “villains” while staring down the camera is self-aggrandizing by any reading, and a rerun of his own campaign ad is about as partisan as footage gets.
Our view: this is illegal on GAO’s own terms, and the White House knows it, which is why it keeps citing the one test it passes.
The Man With a Dozen Complaints
Craig Holman has watched this play out before. The Public Citizen government ethics expert helped file a complaint on September 25 asking GAO and the Office of Special Counsel to pull the ads, noting they ran in two markets holding key midterm districts. He also noted that roughly a dozen Hatch Act complaints the group filed over the past year went nowhere at OSC.
Follow his complaint through the machinery and the problem is plain. The president is exempt from the Hatch Act. OSC sits inside the executive branch. GAO can issue an opinion, and if it finds a violation, the Antideficiency Act requires the agency to report it to Congress and to the president. The report goes to the man in the ad.
The Kristi Noem campaign at Homeland Security ran the same course. Tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars went to spots showcasing a Cabinet secretary shortly before she was pushed out. The money was spent all the same.
The Calendar Is the Strategy
Only Congress controls the money, and it has already spent its leverage for the fall. The stopgap it passed on September 1 funds the government through December 11 at current terms, which carries forward the same propaganda ban and does nothing to enforce it.
Midterms are November 3. The next moment appropriators can name the account and zero it out arrives five weeks after the last vote is counted. A White House that labels its ads “Paid for by the U.S. Government” can run them through Election Day under a statute that already forbids them, because every referee who might stop it either works for the president or does not meet until December.
That is also why the “fake news media” line lands the way it does, from an administration that just barred several outlets from the White House grounds. The ad is not a public service announcement. It is a campaign spot with the invoice routed to taxpayers, and the only real question left is whether Kennedy, Tillis and Massie will vote to cut it off in December or just keep saying they dislike it.