(CNN) — When the Trump administration began running taxpayer-funded “public service announcements” that looked suspiciously like campaign ads for President Donald Trump last week, the White House gamely maintained they were “very clearly not campaign ads.”
Then it gave up all pretense.
As of Sunday, the administration was running a new ad that was basically an actual campaign ad, repurposed from Trump’s 2024 bid. It effectively just slapped on a “Paid for by the U.S. Government” disclaimer and called it a day.
Even some Republicans aren’t bothering to try to spin for the White House on this one.
“You can’t spend public money to promote yourself,” Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
Indeed, there’s really no convincing defense for this. The purpose of the ads is clear. The White House’s comparisons to past public service announcements on issues like Covid-19 are ridiculous.
At the same time, even if the White House spends a few million dollars on these ads, are they really going to move the needle in the 2026 midterms — especially given the billions that will be spent overall? Perhaps not. So one could argue that it’s not worth getting too exercised over.
But the ad is merely the latest in a long series of such provocations from Trump.
While episodes like Trump’s mass pardons of January 6 defendants, his efforts to pay them out of an “anti-weaponization” fund and his proposal to pay every US citizen adult $5,000 if Republicans hold the House and Senate this November were brazen acts that got lots of attention, Trump has peppered the last two years with less sensational but no less brazen acts.
Call them microaggressions against our body politic. And given the constant deluge of news these days, much of the public probably forgot about them, if they even noticed in real time.
But as voters prepare to render their judgment on the first two years of Trump’s second term, it’s worth recalling some of the big examples.
The taxpayer-funded ads
The main problem here is that it’s setting a precedent in which the party in power can effectively use taxpayer money to support their own campaign to hold on to power. It might never take off as a practice, but it’s yet another striking example of the administration bulldozing the line between government business and Trump’s politics.
Rewriting the history of January 6 on a federal website
The White House greeted the fifth anniversary of the Capitol attack by launching a government website that echoed baseless conspiracy theories that the demonstrators that day were “peaceful protesters” who were provoked by law enforcement.
Selling Wall Street early access to Trump’s Truth Social posts
While it’s not unheard-of to provide such data feeds, known as APIs, this takes on a whole new valence when the feed is of Trump posts that are effectively press releases from the federal government — many of which have clear and demonstrable effects on the markets. The firms are basically being allowed to pay Trump’s business to get a leg up on everyone else with their investment decisions. And Truth Social even promoted the idea accordingly, citing Trump’s “most market-moving Truths.”
Trying to put his name on the Kennedy Center
When the president’s hand-picked Kennedy Center board first tried this last year, Trump professed to being “surprised.” Now he’s openly holding the center hostage to try to secure that same goal.
The juvenile plaques of former presidents in the White House
The White House installed plaques along Trump’s “Presidential Walk of Fame” that feature Trump’s juvenile and conspiratorial taunts of some of his predecessors. They include Joe Biden being represented by a photo of an autopen, an allusion to Barack Obama’s “highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act,” and stating on Bill Clinton’s: “In 2016, President Clinton’s wife, Hillary, lost the Presidency to President Donald J. Trump!”
Demanding DOJ pay him $230 million
Before the president tried to secure the anti-weaponization fund through a dubious settlement between himself and the government he controls, Trump tried to go much further: He demanded that his own Justice Department pay him $230 million to compensate him for the federal investigations into his actions. (Even aside from the appearance of making his own government pay him, Trump was not acquitted of any crimes.)
The Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor executive order
Trump back in an April 2025 proclamation explicitly ordered federal investigations of two his political foes. It was a low-profile early signal that he would trample all over the norm that says presidents don’t try to sic the Justice Department on their enemies.
Firing inspectors general
On one Friday night, Trump fired the independent watchdogs that oversaw more than a dozen federal agencies — and had proved a bit of a nuisance to Trump in his first term. One of them had reportedly been investigating a business of Elon Musk, who was then a prominent part of the administration. A judge later ruled the firings were illegal because Congress wasn’t given sufficient notice, but declined to reinstate the inspectors general.
Repeatedly promoting stocks he just bought
A CNN investigation in July reported that Trump used his social media feed to promote more than 20 companies just days after buying stock in them. That included sometimes announcing government action that would benefit those companies. Notably, those dollar sums don’t compare to the billions he’s made on cryptocurrency.
His dinner for crypto investors
Trump in May 2025 hosted a black-tie dinner for more than 200 top holders of the president’s personal $TRUMP meme coin, with the top 25 getting a small VIP reception. While it’s normal to hold such events with campaign donors, these people were effectively putting money directly in Trump’s pockets — and being rewarded with access if they gave enough.
Freezing and canceling funds for blue states
It’s been evident for a long time that the administration has been targeting the funding of blue states that didn’t vote for Trump. By July, it just came out and admitted it in court. It said it had canceled clean-energy grants “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state” — in other words, whether it “was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State.”
Repeatedly threatening possible war crimes in Iran
It’s not really news anymore, because Trump has done it so often (and it’s possible it’s just posturing). But his repeated threats to annihilate Iran and target its infrastructure like power plants, bridges, oil wells and water desalination plants are hugely provocative on the world stage, in that such actions might constitute war crimes. They also put the military in the awful position of having to decide whether it would carry out potentially illegal orders.
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