Page F2From§Eachthe milkman edition — 25 September 2026
As it ran on the front
Let's be clear about what happened, because the coverage has gotten sloppy. The administration purchased airtime on cable news. That's it. That's the whole story. Governments explain themselves to the public all the time — public health notices, tax deadlines, the occasional reminder about which countries we are and are not. ABC News reports the spot in question features the president stating, in his own voice, that the United States "will never be a communist country." That's not a campaign message. That's a fact. A true fact, delivered flatly, the way the Department of Transportation tells you a bridge is closed.
Although — and I want to be precise here — nobody was asking. There is no live communist takeover requiring rebuttal. There is no ballot measure. There is just an ad, purchased with public money, informing the public of something the public did not question, in the voice of one man. I'm not sure "public service announcement" is the phrase I want. Let me come back to that.…
…(cont) Because it turns out the anti-communism spot wasn't alone. CBS News reports a second flight, "Love Me," also taxpayer-funded, also on network and cable, also built around the president. Two ads, same subject, same funding source, and at that point I have to admit the word I was reaching for earlier was "campaign." A government messaging campaign doesn't ask you to love it. A candidate does. A candidate pays for that with candidate money, from people who chose to give it, not from the general fund of people who chose nothing.
Which is presumably the theory Rep. Jamie Raskin is working from when he calls this "felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes," per the Washington Examiner — a specific legal phrase, not a mood, aimed at a specific transaction: your money, spent to make you feel a certain way about the man spending it.
So to summarize the government's position, which I am still defending: this is public messaging, it happens to be indistinguishable from a campaign ad, it happens to ask for affection rather than compliance, and it happens to be under the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for embezzlement. None of that changes the deadline for your own taxes, which remains firm, unaffected by love, funded the usual way — by you, without a spot on cable telling you to feel good about it.
“They ran an ad on your dime telling you the country isn't communist, then a second ad, also on your dime, telling you to love the guy — that's not messaging, that's a campaign spot with the campaign part surgically removed so it can bill the Treasury. Congressman calls it felony conversion of government property, which is a fancy way of saying they used your wallet to buy you a Valentine. Nobody asked if we were communist; somebody asked for the airtime bill.”
“Look, this is basic public communication — the administration has every right to inform Americans about the economy, and if the president's voice happens to be in that ad, that's just — that's the medium, that's how information travels now. It's not a campaign ad, it's a status update, it's — okay, it does ask people to love him, specifically, by name, which — did I just defend a taxpayer-funded ad that says "love me"? That doesn't sound like a policy briefing, that sounds like a Valentine with a government letterhead, forget I said "status update."”
The receipts
The 2025 reconciliation law cut SNAP by $187 billion - the largest cut in the program's history. SNAP feeds one in five American children Congressional Budget Office estimate, via CBPP SNAP tracker
Administration's pro-Trump TV ad is taxpayer-fundedThe Trump administration is running a pro-Trump ad on cable news featuring Trump boasting about his record and vowing the US "will never be a communist country."
Democratic lawmakers and critics of President Donald Trump are sounding the alarm over his new ad that says its anti-socialist message ahead of the midterm elections was paid for by the U.S. government. “This may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes,”
Ads promoting President Trump and paid for by American taxpayers are now airing on network and national cable.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.