On Sunday night, a federal judge stopped President Donald Trump’s government-funded TV ads, ordering the White House to stop producing commercial spots ahead of the midterms.
Manhattan U.S. District Judge Jennifer Rochon hit the administration with a temporary restraining order just before 7 p.m., freezing any remaining airtime and locking down the rest of a $20 million Department of Homeland Security ad budget.
A lawsuit from Common Cause and union bosses catalyzed the case. It demanded the administration immediately halt any active contracts or future airings for the ads, which featured Trump touting his achievements and warning, “America will never be a communist country.”
The administration had issued a notification that the ads would stop by the end of the weekend, but the judge issued the ruling anyway.
On October 5, Trump wrote the following on Truth Social: “The Radical Left is upset with the fact that I am taking Ads, which I consider to be a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A., and paying for them with U.S.A. money. This is a rather standard thing to do but, rather than doing that, although nothing will make them happy, I have decided to do the Patriotic Ads, among others, and pay for them myself, and with money I raised for MAGA, Inc.”
Yet the outrage from the Left ignores an old Washington reality: spending public money on self-serving media campaigns is a bipartisan issue.
Leftists conveniently forget that previous Democratic presidents repeatedly used taxpayer money to blast their own agendas into American living rooms. Republicans called a 2010 HHS Medicare ad that featured Andy Griffith a violation of the spirit of federal laws. In 2015, the Government Accountability Office found that Barack Obama’s EPA had broken federal anti-propaganda and anti-lobbying rules with a social media campaign promoting its Waters of the U.S. rule.
More recently, the Biden-Harris administration shelled out hundreds of millions of federal dollars for its massive “We Can Do This” campaign promoting COVID-19 vaccines, flooding the airwaves with messaging.
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