propaganda

WASHINGTON — The Democratic National Committee on Wednesday sued President Trump’s administration for recent television advertisements that promoted his political message while costing taxpayers millions of dollars.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that the ads are illegal government-sponsored propaganda and accuses Trump of personally directing them. It asks the court to declare the ads illegal and stop the use of federal funds to pay for them.

Trump has faced bipartisan backlash for the ads, which glorify him and echo his campaign pitch as voters cast early ballots with the midterm elections less than a month away.

The spots, which began airing in September, already have cost more than $12 million to run, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact, and a total of $20 million in Homeland Security Department funding has been tapped to pay for them.

Responding Monday to the criticism, Trump defended the ads as “positive promotion for our Great U.S.A.” but said he’d pay for them using his MAGA Inc. super PAC going forward.

But on Tuesday, the fifth ad in the campaign began airing with the notice “paid for by the U.S. Government,” promoting Trump’s military actions in Venezuela earlier this year. The same day, Trump made it clear he hasn’t committed to reimbursing any money that has already been spent, telling reporters “we’ll decide.”

DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement that Trump is misusing taxpayer dollars in “a last-ditch attempt to save Republicans in November.”

“Americans deserve better than to have their hard-earned tax dollars used for Trump’s illegal schemes,” he added.

Legal experts have suggested the ads run afoul of a federal statute against congressionally appropriated money being used for “publicity or propaganda,” and potentially other federal laws. The Homeland Security money tapped for the ads comes from a $175 million package Congress gave to the department as part of Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda.

The White House has defended the ads as public service announcements akin to what past administrations have done to promote various policies. Legal experts have said the recent ads differ from many past public service announcements because they aren’t aimed at helping members of the public benefit from specific government programs.

The defendants in the lawsuit — Trump, the White House, DHS and the Office of Management and Budget — didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Swenson writes for the Associated Press.

The White House has spent days fiercely defending three taxpayer-funded advertisements that glorify President Trump — approaching at least $1.5 million in public spending — calling them public service announcements.

“Don’t let the Fake News get away with their lies about our epic Public Service Announcements that have been running on tv,” White House communications director Steven Cheung posted on X on Sunday.

But the Republican administration’s ads attracted mounting criticism on Monday, including from members of Trump’s own party.

“It shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters.

“It would not have been something that I would have done. And I know that the White House is not covered by the same guidance that we are, but it’s not something that I would have done,” said Sen. Mike Rounds, another South Dakota Republican.

Multiple legal experts consulted by the Associated Press said the ads appear to run afoul of federal statutes, including a law against congressionally appropriated funds being used for “publicity or propaganda” and a law that limits the partisan political activities of government employees.

They said the new ads, which are airing on network and cable TV and streaming, differ from other administrations’ PSAs because they aren’t designed to help Americans access any specific program.

“You watch all three ads, they’re sheer propaganda,” said Richard Painter, a former White House ethics czar under Republican President George W. Bush. “This is increasingly looking like what authoritarian governments do to promote their leaders.”

The heightened scrutiny comes as the Trump administration has increased spending on the ads and bought time on popular TV shows, including college football and National Football League programming. It remains unclear which part of the government is supplying the funds.

With both chambers of Congress led by Republicans, any oversight would likely have to come from Trump’s allies, decreasing the likelihood of hearings or other accountability efforts before November’s midterm elections.

Three ads have aired in less than a week, totaling well over $1M

The first ad in the campaign, which began airing last Wednesday, features clips of Trump talking about defeating communism interspersed with onscreen text promoting the “largest tax cuts in history,” “reigniting American manufacturing” and a call to “defend law and order and police.”

Later in the week, a second ad began running, showing scenic videos of Mount Rushmore at night with quotes and clips from Trump’s Fourth of July weekend speech there honoring the country’s 250th anniversary.

The latest of the ads, a spot first aired over the weekend, is virtually identical to an ad for Trump’s Republican reelection campaign in 2024. It shows him walking down a hallway as his voice can be heard warning of a “final battle” against “globalists” and “warmongers.”

All three ads end with a message that says: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.” The White House hasn’t responded to inquiries about which part of the government is paying.

According to AdImpact, which tracks media spending, the spots have so far cost more than $1.4 million and run across a wide range of TV networks around the country. The actual amount spent could be significantly more, depending on whether networks classified the ad as a political ad.

The ads are different from past PSAs, experts say

In defending the campaign, the White House published a list of PSAs from recent Democratic and Republican administrations.

Among the examples it cited were Bush’s Republican administration touting a Medicare law, Barack Obama’s Democratic administration promoting Affordable Care Act subsidies and Joe Biden’s Democratic administration running ads promoting COVID-19 vaccinations.

“The announcements are very clearly not campaign ads; President Trump is not on the ballot and there is no call to action,” the White House wrote. “Instead, the announcements are a reminder for Americans to love their country and know why it’s worth defending — at home, at the border, and abroad.”

Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said in her view the new ads differ from the examples the White House provided because they aren’t aimed at helping members of the public benefit from specific government programs.

“These ads are nothing more than government propaganda, aimed at helping Trump,” she said.

Painter, who joined the Bush administration after the Medicare PSAs went out, said that ad campaign toed the line on appropriateness because it included misleading information about Medicare Part D. But he said Trump’s campaign is a far more egregious violation of the statute that blocks congressionally appropriated money from being spent on publicity or propaganda.

“There’s nothing in here about a particular policy that’s at all focused,” Painter said of Trump’s ads. “One of them is just about the evils of the deep state. Another one of them is about communists and Marxists.”

In its support for the ads, the White House also referenced the administrations of President Woodrow Wilson and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, both of whom used posters, radio and film to rally the country during World Wars I and II.

James Kimble, a communication professor at Seton Hall University who studies domestic propaganda, said it’s true that Wilson’s Democratic administration used propaganda to rally Americans. But he said most Americans no longer view its actions in a positive light.

“By almost any objective measure, looking back, we find what they did pretty repulsive,” he said.

Skepticism of the campaign grows on the Hill

Top Democrats on the Senate and House appropriations committees last week wrote to the White House demanding the ads be taken down and requesting more information on how much money was spent to create and air them.

In the days since, more than a dozen Democrats and a handful of Republicans have spoken up to further criticize the ads. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the latest ad “an absolute violation of what a democracy is supposed to look like.”

“Americans sat down to watch football, not to be force-fed Trump’s propaganda on their own dime,” he said in a Senate floor speech Monday.

Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that no public official should spend public money on private ads for themselves.

And Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger, had his own harsh words for the administration on Monday.

“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,” he wrote in an X post.

The Republican chairs of the Senate and House appropriation committees didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Swenson writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Steven Sloan contributed to this report.

“America will never be a communist country,” states the 30-second television ad.

Never mind that socialism is a more probable scenario given the rise of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Nithya Raman’s healthy lead in the Los Angeles mayoral race. This commercial is not about semantics, political systems or the health of the nation.

It’s about touting the alleged achievements of President Donald Trump, from “reigniting American manufacturing” to “defend[ing] law and order” and giving Americans the “largest tax cuts in history.”

One can argue the legitimacy of such claims if they still have the energy to do so after 10 years of relentless MAGA puffery, but the real issue here is that this particular piece of bluster is produced and funded by the U.S. government.

Laws prohibit taxpayer funds from being used for “publicity or propaganda,” even if the White House is referring to its new ad campaign as a PSA.

“This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America, and it is an egregious and utterly illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars,” wrote Democratic House and Senate Appropriations Committee members in a letter sent Friday to Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

They demanded that the ad be immediately taken off the air and that “Federal employees who knowingly violated Federal law in working on and paying for this advertisement” be disciplined. “The law is not complicated,” they wrote. “You cannot use taxpayer dollars for political advertisements.”

The spot, which first aired Wednesday on conservative media outlets Fox News and Newsmax, cost $14,000, according to the firm AdImpact, which tracks media spending. By Friday, that number had jumped to $430,000 as the ad hit multiple markets across the country.

And it isn’t the only instance of American tax dollars at work — for Trump. A second ad paid for by you aired Thursday night on CBS.

The minute-long commercial featured footage of the president speaking against the backdrop of Mount Rushmore in an audacious display that might have turned George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt to stone if they weren’t already immortalized in granite.

It included clips from the U.S. military’s Jan. 3 capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, snippets from Trump’s Independence Day weekend speech, a voiceover from UFC CEO Dana White praising the president as “the toughest, most resilient person” he’s ever met, and a montage of images featuring Trump, Trump and more Trump. It ends with the star of the show proclaiming, “This is only the beginning of the golden age of America,” then comes the written disclosure: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”

Anyone who has lived in or traveled to countries with state-run media will recognize the similarities between Trump’s ads and those of, say, former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein or current strongmen like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un: the intense leader-like gaze, the baseless claims, substandard production quality and music that suggests the subject of the ad should be worshipped. (Trump’s choice for the first ad was “Love Me” by R&B singer JMSN, who opposed the use with an emphatic “I would never…”)

But on U.S. television, the ad feels more desperate than dictatorial. The whiff of desperation coming from the ad blitz may have something to do with the president’s dismal polling numbers headed into November’s midterms.

The administration has argued its ads are “educational and unapologetically patriotic” public service announcements. The White House said in a statement, “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.”

A White House official reportedly said that the PSAs “are clearly not political” and noted that “the President is not on the ballot and the ads don’t have a call to action.”

Trump has repeatedly told his base to vote like he was on the ballot.

With propaganda like this coming out of the White House, communism is hardly the biggest threat facing the country.