Black-and-white footage released this weekend shows President Donald Trump walking down a hallway. In the audio track, he asks viewers to join him in his fight to “expel the warmongers from our government.”
On-screen text at the end of the spot states it was “Paid for by the U.S. government.” The White House has labeled the video part of a public service announcement campaign.
According to NBC News, a White House official said the spots are not campaign material. The official stated, “The PSAs are clearly not political. The president is not on the ballot, and the ads don’t have a call to action.”
Officials compare the spots to earlier government campaigns from past administrations
The new video matches almost frame-for-frame an advertisement that Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign posted on Truth Social in January 2024. The taxpayer-funded version cuts the closing seconds that once displayed the line “Join President Trump’s fight to save America” and the campaign logo.
In the current cut, Trump calls the moment the “final battle.” He says he will “demolish the deep state” and “throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”
The narration ends with the sentence, “We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”
A separate White House television ad aired last week featured Trump talking about how he wanted to “defeat communism,” set to the song Love Me by JMSN. Officials have used the same public-service-announcement description for both videos, such as when the administration aired a government-funded ad targeting communism that drew criticism from both sides.
Federal rules generally prohibit the use of public funds for political advertising and require certain public filings. The administration’s PSA label leaves it unclear whether those filings exist. The White House has not identified which government account paid for the airtime. The administration has previously used government resources to promote the president, such as launching a streaming service called Trump TV.
A spokesperson repeated language first offered last week: “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.”
The White House did not give a direct answer when asked why the new video so closely copies the 2024 campaign ad. Officials instead listed earlier government efforts, including a Health and Human Services ad from the George W. Bush years, an Environmental Protection Agency social-media drive under Barack Obama in 2014 and 2015, and a Covid-19 vaccination push under Joe Biden.
The Government Accountability Office earlier faulted the Bush and Obama campaigns for disclosure and propaganda-rule problems. White House communications director Steven Cheung wrote Sunday, “Don’t let the Fake News get away with their lies about our epic Public Service Announcements that have been running on tv.”
Democratic appropriators Sen. Patty Murray, Sen. Jack Reed, Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Rep. Steny Hoyer sent a Friday letter to chief of staff Susie Wiles that said, “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.”
Sen. John Kennedy told CBS on Sunday that public officials should not “spend public money on private ads for themselves.”
