THE LEAD: President Trump has repurposed an ad from his 2024 presidential campaign, pledging to defeat communists, war-mongers and anything else that might show up in a 1980s Rambo movie:
The Trump administration put out a new ad this weekend as part of its “PSA” campaign, this time showing President Donald Trump walking down a hallway as he asks people to join him in his fight to “expel the warmongers from our government.”
The ad — which at the end says it was “Paid for by the U.S. government” — is nearly identical to an ad put out by Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
Trump posted that ad to Truth Social in January 2024. The repurposed ad now includes “Paid for by the U.S. government.” But it excludes the last few seconds of the 2024 ad, which ends with text reading “Join President Trump’s fight to save America” and his 2024 campaign logo.
ETHICS EXPERTS WEIGH IN: The ad have drawn condemnation from ethicists and political experts on both sides of the aisle, in that taxpayer funds are used to essentially rerun a presidential ad:
Some ethics experts have argued that the Trump administration is violating federal laws banning the use of taxpayer dollars for propaganda, and the ads have drawn criticism from both parties. The most recent ad, one expert argued, is a more flagrant violation given its prior use in the political arena.
“The president and his administration have gone from breaking the law to trampling it,” said Norm Eisen, a former White House special counsel for ethics and government reform under Barack Obama, who has sued the Trump administration several times. “The prior ad was bad enough, but this one openly repurposes prior political conduct.”
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Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, said the use of federal funds for the ads could be an “abuse of power” and “an impeachable offense.” He urged Congress to demand a reimbursement for the spending.
“This is very dangerous,” Mr. Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, said in a phone interview on Sunday. “We do not allow government-sponsored propaganda in the United States.”
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: The ad ran over the weekend during “Saturday Night Live,” and several sporting events. It also ran during “Fox News Live,” another program in which people are more likely to be watching it at the time of the event rather than as a binge watch, an on-demand program or through some other form of time-shifting.
Add that to what was guaranteed to be media outrage about this approach and it’s clear the ad grabbed more than its fair share of eyeballs in the past couple days. Simply put, if the president wanted people to pay attention to this, well, mission accomplished.
Calling out almost anything in politics for “ethical issues” is adorably naive at this point in time. It’s like expecting people on the Chicagoland freeways to do exactly 55 mph. That said, the question of intended impact might be worth digging into here.
I remember being in Missouri one year when a proposal for a right-to-carry law was on the ballot. It had barely failed before and this time, the gun lobby really poured the money into the ad game in hopes of getting across the finish line this time.
The side that didn’t want the ballot initiative to pass basically cried, “Uncle.” They didn’t buy bumper stickers or billboards or anything else, as they were basically incapable of matching the money coming in for ad buys on the other side. The general vibe was that one side had essentially spent the other into oblivion.
However, the initiative ended up LOSING even worse than before. The post-mortem analysis found that people who might have sat out on the election saw the ads everywhere and kind of freaked out. People who might have been on the fence also kind of freaked out at the prevalence of the ads and voted against the initiative.
So, the question in relation to an ad like this coming into the midterms is: Will this make people more likely to vote for candidates directly attached to Trump or of his party? Or will it make them less likely to vote for those folks?
Or are we in kind of a weird singularity, in which every human being of voting age in this country has a calcified opinion of Trump and the country to the point that an ad of him curing cancer or one of him eating a live baby wouldn’t matter to how they vote?
DISCUSSION STARTER: Watch the ad and write a few short paragraphs about how it impacts you (or doesn’t) in relation to the upcoming elections. What do you see as the intended audience of this ad and how do you think it will impact those people? What similarities and differences exist between your personal sense of impact and what you think it might have on the other people you view as the intended audience? Talk about this in a small group and then bring it back to the main class. Focus less on “Trump good” or “Trump bad” as this isn’t a poli sci thing. Focus more on the ad and its messaging in relation to the audiences that received the content.
