With midterm voting underway, the line between public service announcements and campaign advertising is becoming blurred.
During Sunday broadcasts, rather than promotional spots for Papa John’s pizza deals or Jake from State Farm pitching insurance, supporters rooting for their NFL or college teams were presented with a 30-second, monochrome video featuring President Donald Trump. The clip, nearly identical to a Trump campaign advertisement released in 2024, shows the president moving silently down a corridor as a voiceover issues a warning about an impending “final battle” to “cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists” and to “liberate America from these villains once and for all.”
One element stood out: the airing carried a label reading “Paid for by the U.S. Government,” funded by taxpayers. This addition marks the latest in a sequence of White House promotions, including a minute-long compilation of quotes and clips from older Trump speeches that began airing last Friday and a 30-second spot that premiered the prior week—set to JMSN’s “Love Me”—featuring footage from the president at campaign rallies and speeches, with on-screen text crediting him for enacting the “largest tax cuts in history” and for “reigniting American manufacturing.” NBC News noted that the ads have cost taxpayers more than $1.7 million, according to AdImpact estimates.
As early voting for the November midterms has already begun, the promotions appear to be a showy bid by Trump to sway voters toward Republican candidates. Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, describes the ads as a “gross violation of democratic norms, campaign norms, and expectations that government will treat citizens impartially.”
Even as the White House insists these are “very clearly not campaign ads” since Trump is “not on the ballot and there is no call to action,” the spots echo a speech he delivered at the Republican midterm gathering in Dallas earlier this month, where he urged voters to “pretend that I’m on the ballot” and labeled his opponents as the “pundits, the fake news media, and the radical left communists.”
Since 1951, spending bills approved by Congress have prohibited using appropriated funds for “publicity or propaganda,” a constraint noted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). This is reflected in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026, which states that “no part of any appropriation contained in this Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes not authorized by the Congress.”
The prohibition on publicity or propaganda does not “bar materials that may contain some political content, nor does it require agencies to present a balanced view of a particular activity or policy.” However, it does prohibit communications that are “completely political in nature and lack a connection to the agency’s official business,” such as those that are covert, self-aggrandizing, or purely partisan.
In a press release, the White House defended the ads as “public service announcements,” likening them to efforts by earlier administrations. Yet the examples cited to justify the Trump administration’s actions contradict this argument, since past administrations often tied such efforts to specific agencies or programs rather than centering them on a political figure or party.
Originally created to keep Americans informed about the country’s actions during World Wars I and II, President Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Office of War Information ultimately became instruments of media censorship and government propaganda.
The 2002 anti-drug campaign of the George W. Bush administration originated from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The 2004 Bush-era effort used funds from the Department of Health and Human Services to “inform Medicare beneficiaries about changes to Medicare” after a new bill passed. Yet the GAO determined that the campaign materials constituted “covert propaganda” and violated the “publicity or propaganda prohibition.” Campaigns released during the Obama and Biden administrations similarly addressed public issues within the purview of federal agencies, such as enrolling in Obamacare and securing the COVID-19 vaccine.
Margaret Dylus-Yukins, senior legal counsel for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, stated that the ads have no “apparent connection to any federal program or service.”
“We don’t know which agency paid to produce and place these ads, but it’s hard to see a legitimate government purpose for spending taxpayer dollars on messages whose sole apparent aim is to promote the president and reinforce his political message weeks before an election,” she said.
Olson characterizes the ads as something a vanquished Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán might attempt. In fact, Olson notes that Orbán tried this tactic in Hungary’s April election and failed, as “Hungarian voters decided they were tired of living under a regime that would do such things.”
