Ethics experts say government-funded Trump ad may violate Hatch Act
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the White House funded and produced a pro-Trump advertisement that aired on Fox News and Newsmax and concluded with a closing disclaimer that it was “paid for by the US government.”
A Miami-based CBS News reporter first noticed the spot during a commercial break Wednesday night on Fox News’s “Jesse Watters Primetime.” AdImpact, a firm that tracks political advertising, told the Journal that the advertisement also ran on Fox News in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and on Newsmax in Chicago. No public information was available about how much the federal government paid to air the spot.
The advertisement opens with Trump’s voice saying “Together we will defeat communism, Marxism in America once and for all,” followed by dozens of images of the president at White House events. A choir sings “love me” in the background. The ad ends with Trump saying “America will never be a communist country” and small text at the bottom of the screen reading “paid for by the US government.”
A senior administration official confirmed to the Journal that the advertisement was a White House product and said it had been shared directly to the administration’s YouTube page earlier in the month. The video first appeared on the White House website roughly 10 days before the broadcast and on the White House TikTok account at the beginning of September.
The White House did not respond to repeated requests for more information, including the cost of airing the advertisement in several expensive media markets. Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News, and News Corp., the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, share common ownership.
Ethics specialists criticized the use of public funds to pay for an advertisement that, they said, appears to incorporate a voice clip from the Republican National Convention. Daniel Weiner, a former campaign-finance official and senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice, which has been critical of Trump on ethics issues, called the spot “an astonishing misuse of public resources in the campaign context, one of the most blatant I’ve ever seen.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) posted on X that the ad may violate federal law, including the Hatch Act, which restricts political activity by executive branch employees. “It is blatantly unethical under numerous federal ethics provisions proscribing the use of government resources for political campaigns,” Raskin wrote. By statute, the president is exempt from the Hatch Act.
Campaign-finance attorney Brett Kappel told the Journal that congressional appropriators often prohibit federal agencies from spending funds on propaganda, but that those restrictions are agency-specific. The generic “paid for by the US government” disclaimer obscures which agency might be responsible for the buy, Kappel said.
The advertisement aired as Trump welcomed Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, to Washington with a red-carpet ceremony and a flyover by U.S. fighter jets. It comes as Republican campaigns have increasingly centered their messaging on opposing socialism and communism, and the Trump White House has faced repeated scrutiny over alleged Hatch Act violations.