Trump personally helped orchestrate taxpayer-funded ads promoting himself and his policies, source says

By Kristen Holmes, Betsy Klein, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump has personally driven the controversial, taxpayer-funded video ads promoting himself and his administration’s policies, including helping select the imagery and videos used, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.

Two Trump advisers familiar with the ads said that they were being created in-house by the White House video team — which is part of the communications team, responsible for the administration’s public messaging.

Coming just over a month before the November midterms, the ads have generated bipartisan criticism over how the Trump administration is spending taxpayer dollars.

“It’s a great message. I like the message, but it shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters in the Capitol on Monday.

GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas echoed that sentiment: “It’s not even a close question.”

The White House has broadly defended the ads, saying they are akin to public service announcements past administrations have put out about Medicare, Obamacare and Covid-19 vaccinations. Officials have insisted they “are very clearly not campaign ads.”

“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,” a White House spokesperson said Monday.

But the imagery is undeniably meant to promote Trump, casting him as a warrior battling against existential threats. And the latest one appears nearly identical to a video Trump posted on Truth Social in January 2024, during his third presidential campaign.

That most recent ad shows Trump walking down a hall as audio plays of him saying “this is the final battle.”

“We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will 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,” Trump says in the ad, echoing comments he made during a Veterans Day speech in 2023.

The version on Truth Social has an additional six seconds that includes Trump’s campaign logo and a number to text. The text “Paid for by the US Government” is seen across the screen at the end of the new version of the ad.

Multiple members of Trump’s political operation said they were unaware that these ads were coming until they aired. But another source pushed back on the notion that anyone was kept in the dark — noting that the president had spoken about the ads to multiple aides and advisers and insisting that they were not being made in secret.

The latest ad — which aired during at least two NFL games on Sunday, during Fox’s broadcasts of the Washington Commanders-Seattle Seahawks matchup as well as the Carolina Panthers-Cleveland Browns game — is the third government-funded message in recent days to be captured by the media tracker AdImpact.

An ad that began airing Wednesday featured rapidly edited pictures and video of Trump over audio of him denouncing communism and socialism. Text on the screen touted his administration’s accomplishments, including “reigniting American manufacturing.”

“The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic,” a White House spokesperson said in a statement. “We should be proud of our country.”

The music used in that ad — a song called “Love Me” by JMSN — has also come under scrutiny. Lawyers for the artist sent White House chief of staff Susie Wiles a letter on Monday asking the administration to “immediately withdraw the advertisement from all scheduled airings” and “cease and desist any use of the Song and/or any of the intellectual property of JMSN.”

A second ad features video of Trump at Mount Rushmore as his voice is heard saying, “Never before has any nation celebrated so magnificent a triumph as this one.”

Beyond questions of intellectual property, watchdog groups say the ads mark a clear violation of appropriations law restricting the use of federal funding for propaganda or partisan communications.

“The most immediate check on this kind of behavior is supposed to be and needs to be Congress. Congress has not asserted itself as the first branch of government with the power of the purse to hold the president accountable,” said Donald Sherman, president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, or CREW, in Washington.

GOP lawmakers may be hesitant to provide accountability, he added, because the ads “are designed to boost Republicans in Congress,” he said.

And, Sherman noted, the Government Accountability Office — the nonpartisan agency that would be tasked with investigations into this type of issue — is currently without Senate-confirmed leadership.

“That makes it that much harder for them to move with speed to address a high-profile and politically sensitive investigation like this requires,” he said.

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a post on X that the ads “may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes.”

And Raskin, who will gain congressional subpoena power in November if Democrats win the House, said it is not just Trump who might face inquiries over the messages. He said the creation of the ads was a “Hatch Act violation for any government employees who worked on it or used government resources to make it.”

“This is dumb, dumb, dumb beyond belief,” one former Trump campaign official told CNN. “These guys are all gonna get subpoenaed. It’s gonna be bad.”

The story has been updated with additional information.

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CNN’s Kit Maher contributed to this report.