To Defend Propaganda, The White House Cited Its Inventors

The White House has a new public service announcement, and it is a jingle that asks the country to love a man.

"This may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes."

— Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), on the White House's taxpayer-funded ad for its own president

If you were watching Fox News in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, or Washington this week, you may have seen a commercial that looked a lot like a campaign ad. A rapid-fire montage of one man, frame after frame. A voice vowing to "defeat communism, socialism and Marxism in America." On-screen text reading "America will never be a communist country." And, in the final ten seconds, the line you would expect to see on any ad from a PAC: "Paid for by the US government."

It was not a PAC. The White House bought the airtime, and the first ad cost at least $443,000, according to the Associated Press. By the end of the week, the government had run a string of such spots and spent at least $1.7 million, according to AdImpact, which tracks political ad spending. The administration's explanation is that these are public service announcements, "educational and unapologetically patriotic." A choir, a victory montage, and a taxpayer invoice.

The full defense arrived in a lengthy statement titled "Presidential Public Service Announcements Are Nothing New." The argument is that previous administrations have run paid spots, and the White House cited three: a 2002 anti-drug ad during the Super Bowl, a 2015 healthcare.gov explainer, a 2021 HHS vaccine video. None of those ads showed a president. None mentioned a president. This one features Donald Trump in nearly every frame, along with a tribute from UFC boss Dana White: "He is the toughest, most resilient human being I have ever met in my life," a line White has been delivering at Republican convention volume since 2024. The on-screen slogans boast about the "Largest tax cuts in history" and "Reigniting American manufacturing."

The White House also insists the ads are "clearly not political," because Trump "is not on the ballot and the ads don't have a call to action." Both things are true, if you treat the president's repeated instructions to his base to "pretend I'm on the ballot" and vote for his party as a private joke.

Translation: the legal theory is that a jingle is not an ad so long as the jingle asks for love instead of votes.

The spots have now come in several flavors. The first is the "Love Me" ad: a chorus from the song "Love Me" by JMSN, used without permission, singing over a montage of the second term. Slowed down, the flash frames become a tour: the Venezuelan raid, a state dinner for the Saudi crown prince, accepting a FIFA peace prize, pardoning a turkey, announcing a new class of navy ships to be named after himself, showing Cristiano Ronaldo a presidential walk of fame. In the original Las Vegas speech, the enemy was specified as "Dumocrat communists in Congress."

The second borrows from a July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore celebrating America's 250th birthday and ends on the slogan the president has used to describe his administration: "This is only the beginning of the golden age of America." It ran on Newsmax, and then on NBC's "Meet the Press." The third is a 2023 campaign ad, rebroadcast by the government. Trump glares directly at camera as a voiceover from a Michigan campaign stop in June 2023 vows to "rout the fake news media" and "liberate America from these villains once and for all." It aired during Fox's college football programming on Saturday and on "Fox News Sunday." The newest is a monochrome clip of Trump walking slowly down a hallway, narrating "the final battle" against "the deep state," "the globalists," and "the sick political class that hates our country."

Translation: the government has not funded a campaign. It has rebranded one, complete with a new tagline.

The legal exposure sits mostly below the Oval Office. The Hatch Act, passed in 1939, prohibits federal employees from partisan political activity. It has never applied to the president himself. That means the person who ordered the ads cannot be charged under it, while every staffer who produced a spot, bought its airtime, or pressed the button can. That is the point made by Raskin, the top House Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, who calls the ad potential felony theft and conversion of government property and says it "is a Hatch Act violation for any government employees who worked on it or used government resources to make it."

Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) has formally asked Chief of Staff Susie Wiles how the first ad was produced and where the money came from. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed its own complaint. And White House Communications Director Steven Cheung answered the coverage of the ads this way: "Don't let the Fake News get away with their lies about our epic Public Service Announcements that have been running on tv."

The deeper answer is in the paperwork. Cheung circulated a fact sheet defending the ads by citing President Woodrow Wilson's wartime information operation, the Creel Committee, the taxpayer-funded propaganda machine that produced the Uncle Sam "I Want You" poster and which, historians say, inspired the propaganda apparatus of 1930s Germany.

Translation: when asked whether a jingle paid for by the US government is propaganda, the White House answered yes, and it supplied a bibliography.

The timing deserves a moment. The "Love Me" ad hit Fox the same week Trump hosted China's leader for a state visit. The ad's core message is that America will never be a communist country, aired on the network that will be broadcasting images of the American president entertaining the head of the world's largest communist country.

It is also worth asking why the ads exist at all. The same week, the White House launched Trump TV, a 24/7 government YouTube channel of the president's speeches, and briefly barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House press pool, after the attorney general called press access "a privilege ... not a right." Add a 37 percent approval rating, the lowest of any sitting president since the Wall Street Journal began tracking in 1990, and an NBC poll finding 55 percent of Americans believe his policies have hurt the economy, and the ads stop looking like a line item. They start looking like a symptom.

The reaction is not unanimous. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), a lame duck, told The Hill that using taxpayer dollars "feels like Viktor Orbán." Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), whose term runs to 2029, said "any public official, including President Trump or Kristi Noem or John Kennedy," should not "spend public money on private ads for themselves." Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) spoke out as well, and JMSN, the singer whose song the White House used without permission, says he is "looking at lawyers handling this." The rest of the GOP has the silence of people who remember what happened to the last ones who tried.

So here is the White House's position, since it is the only part that should be surprising. The ads are educational, patriotic, not on the ballot, and not a call to action. They are like the Medicare drug ads, except the president is in every frame. The legal risk is real for everyone in the building except the president. And the precedent cited for all of it is the committee that invented the modern propaganda playbook.

The chorus in the first ad doesn't say vote. It doesn't say register. It doesn't say pretend he's on the ballot, though he does. It says one word: love me. A president polling at 37 percent has now told the country, in a spot the taxpayer paid for, that the correct response to his second term is affection.

The question was never whether the ad was political. The question was what the White House would do when caught buying its president a jingle with the public treasury. It sent a fact sheet, and it cited Wilson.

The government has always asked for your money. Now it is asking for your love, in a spot that ends with the words "Paid for by the US government," which may be the most honest tagline in American media history.