Donald Trump stole taxpayer funds for ads as GOP fears midterms

By Maya Ellison · Reporting from Detroit ·

Donald Trump repurposed campaign ads using public money to promote himself, a move that Senate Republicans now call a misuse of funds as they struggle to survive the midterms.

The U.S. Treasury is not a campaign piggy bank. Yet Donald Trump is treating it like one. He has personally driven the creation of taxpayer-funded video ads to promote himself and his policies. These are not "public service announcements." They are political commercials paid for by the people they are meant to manipulate. This is a brazen theft of public resources for personal political gain. It is the act of a man who believes the state is his personal property.

The Treasury is not a campaign fund

The details are as insulting as they are simple. CNN reports that Trump helped select the imagery for these ads. One video is nearly identical to a post he put on Truth Social in January 2024. He posted it during his third campaign. The only real difference is the label. The campaign version had a logo and a text number. The government version says "Paid for by the US Government."

In the ad, Trump claims "this is the final battle." He vows to "cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists." He promises to "rout the fake news media." These are not the words of a president informing the public. They are the words of a candidate fighting for survival. These ads aired during NFL games on Fox. Families in my old neighborhood in Flint struggle with the cost of groceries. Yet the President is using our tax dollars to buy airtime for his own ego.

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin did not mince words. He stated on X that the ads "may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes." He also flagged them as a "Hatch Act violation" for the government employees who made them. He is right. When you use the public purse to fund a "final battle" against political enemies, you are not governing. You are stealing.

Branding the state as a vanity project

The ads are just one part of a larger obsession with branding. Fox News reports that Trump has tried to rename multiple federal buildings in Washington, D.C., after himself. He sought to put his name on the Kennedy Center. He added his name to the U.S. Institute of Peace. He even floated a "Trump Promenade" connecting the Lincoln Memorial to the Potomac River.

He even suggested renaming New York's Penn Station and Dulles Airport as a condition for a funding deal. This is not leadership. It is the behavior of a developer who views the capital as a series of billboards. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., has proposed a rule to stop this. He argues that no living politician should have a building named after them. He finally sees the danger of a president who treats the federal government as a subsidiary of his own brand.

The transactional panic of the GOP

For years, Senate Republicans played along. Now, they are panicking. The midterms are five weeks away. France 24 reports that Trump's approval ratings have hit record lows. Egypt Independent notes that GOP candidates are openly breaking with him. They are removing his name from their websites. They are terrified that his toxicity will drag them down.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune says the ads "shouldn't be paid for with taxpayer dollars." Sen. John Cornyn of Texas says the misuse of funds is "not even a close question." But this sudden morality is a joke. It is transactional desperation.

Look at John Cornyn. According to federal records, he introduced legislation to name a highway after Trump in May 2026. He did this just 15 days before he lost his primary runoff to Ken Paxton. Cornyn received only 37 percent of the vote in that runoff. He tried to buy favor with a leader who discarded him anyway. Now that the polls are crashing, the establishment is pretending to care about the rules.

This is the Watergate scandal all over again. The mechanism is the same. The executive branch treats public resources and the state machinery as a personal campaign tool for political survival. Nixon used the state to hide a crime. Trump uses it to buy commercials. Both believed the law did not apply to them.

The defense is weak. Scott Jennings told CNN that other presidents run PSAs. He argued that warning against communism is a "public service." This is the best the loyalists can offer. But a real PSA tells you how to get a vaccine. It does not use a "final battle" script recycled from a campaign ad. When you use public money to "rout the fake news media," you are not serving the public. You are using them to fund your own propaganda.

Donald Trump has misappropriated public funds for political gain. He also attempted to carve his name into the architecture of the capital. He has treated the American taxpayer as a silent donor to his own vanity. Justice requires a full accounting of every cent spent on these ads. It also requires the immediate removal of his name from every federal building. The law must stop a president from using the Treasury as a campaign chest. Otherwise, the law is just a suggestion for the powerful.

Sources

  1. CNN: Trump personally helped orchestrate taxpayer-funded ads promoting himself and his policies, source says
  2. The Daily Beast: Kaitlan Collins Mocks Scott Jennings to His Face on CNN Show
  3. Fox News: Sen Kennedy says no living politicians should have buildings named after them after Trump's moves
  4. France 24: As midterms approach, does GOP have a Trump problem?
  5. Egypt Independent: Inside the Trump campaign strategy to reverse Republicans’ dwindling hopes of winning the midterms