The Trump administration put out a new ad this weekend as part of its “PSA” campaign, this time showing President Donald Trump walking down a hallway as he asks people to join him in his fight to “expel the warmongers from our government.”
The ad — which at the end says it was “Paid for by the U.S. government” — is nearly identical to an ad put out by Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
Trump posted that ad to Truth Social in January 2024. The repurposed ad now includes “Paid for by the U.S. government.” But it excludes the last few seconds of the 2024 ad, which ends with text reading “Join President Trump’s fight to save America” and his 2024 campaign logo.
The ad signals an expansion of the White House’s controversial use of government funds to air pieces that resemble campaign advertisements. Last week, the White House ran a television ad in which Trump described how he wanted to “defeat communism,” set to the song “Love Me” by JMSN. The White House has called the ads “public service announcements.”
In the latest ad, dramatic black-and-white video shows President Trump walking down a hallway with audio of him saying it is the “final battle” and vowing to “demolish the deep state” and “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,” it concludes.
Federal law requires political advertisers to submit certain public disclosures and generally bans using public funds for political advertising. Since the administration maintains the ads are public service announcements, it’s not clear whether those disclosures are available. The White House has not released a specific source of government funding used to air the ads.
AdImpact, a political ad-tracking firm, has estimated that the administration has spent more than $1.7 million to run these ads, which have been running heavily in recent days during prominent television programming like football games, Sunday morning news shows and primetime broadcast shows. That having been said, AdImpact doesn’t have full visibility into airings on every cable channel in every market in the country, hampering that estimate.
The White House defended the ad Sunday, pointing NBC News to a statement it had offered last week when it commented on the other ads released by the administration.
“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. The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic. We should be proud of our country,” a White House spokesperson said.
Another White House official pushed back on the line of questioning: “The PSAs are clearly not political. The president is not on the ballot, and the ads don’t have a call to action.”
The White House did not specifically respond to NBC News’ question about the ad’s being nearly identical to the 2024 Trump campaign ad.
A White House spokesperson also pointed to past examples of ads released by former administrations, including an ad by George W. Bush’s Department of Health and Human Services, a social media campaign by Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency in 2014 and 2015 and an effort by Joe Biden’s administration encouraging Covid-19 vaccination.
The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office dinged the Bush and Obama ad campaigns — Bush’s for not properly disclosing the government was the source and Obama’s for violating “publicity or propaganda and anti-lobbying provisions.”
White House communications director Steven Cheung defended the recent pro-Trump ads Sunday on social media, writing, “Don’t let the Fake News get away with their lies about our epic Public Service Announcements that have been running on tv.”
CNN and The New York Times were first to report about the ad’s being almost identical to Trump’s 2024 campaign ad.
Spending taxpayer dollars on the ads has raised legal and ethical concerns and condemnation from both parties.
“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,” congressional Democratic appropriators wrote in a letter Friday addressed to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.
The letter was signed by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.; Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I.; Rep. Rosa De Lauro, D-Conn.; and Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md.
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said Sunday in an interview with CBS that public officials should not “spend public money on private ads for themselves.”
