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Page F5From§Eachthe midnight edition — 6 October 2026

WHO PAYS NOW

Called illegal for using tax dollars on his own ads, Trump keeps the ads, swaps the wallet.

By ChipStaff Writer

“Trump says Super Pac will pay for taxpayer-funded ads that sparked outcry”, 6 October 2026 (Photo via The Guardian — the original report)

As it ran on the front

The president says his super PAC will cover the Patriotic Ads from here out, and the case he makes for the switch is, on its face, a defense: the spots are "a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A." — a positive promotion, except the statute governing public money doesn't have a line item for "positive." It has a line for political advertising, and auditors don't ask whether the politics felt patriotic before they flag the spending.

Start where the warning started, on Sept. 29, when Senate Republicans — his own party — warned him in public not to use taxpayer money to promote himself in such a brazenly political way. The same day, Democrats and The Wall Street Journal put a figure on what the warning concerned: up to $20 million in Department of Homeland Security money, routed through Customs and Border Protection, for ads the Journal reported the president personally pushed for and helped create. Two days into October, Reps. Jamie Raskin and George Whitesides asked federal watchdogs to investigate, calling the spending "plainly illegal" and the ads themselves "narcissistic ego trips." That's the sentence the administration had to answer this week — not a talking point, a filing.…

…(cont) What changed, across eight news organizations reporting the same Monday statement, is who signs the check, not whether the ads keep running. The Guardian priced the exposure so far at "at least $1.5m in federal funds" — a separate figure, from a separate count, dated a week after the $20 million Democrats cited in September; nothing in the record ties the two numbers to each other, and nothing in the record says the $1.5 million is the whole bill, or that the rest comes back. What the record does say, in eight versions of one sentence, is that public money paid for ads promoting a sitting president five weeks before a midterm election, lawmakers in both parties said that was against the law, and the response was not to pull the ads down. It was to change the name on the account that pays for them.

He said the ads weren't political. Then his political committee picked up the tab.

“They never stopped the self-promotion, they just took your name off the receipt — the ads keep running, the message doesn't change, only the billing address does. This is what "plainly illegal" gets you now: not a refund, not an apology, just a different account paying for the same commercial, starring the same guy, five weeks before you vote.”
Sal
“Nobody's pulling anything off the air here — the president is simply being a good steward, moving the cost to his own committee, a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A. paid for with U.S.A. money, which — wait, no, that's the old arrangement, the one everybody just called illegal. The point is he heard the criticism and acted like a leader, unlike every other administration, none of which has ever had to call in its own super PAC to clean up after a government ad buy.”
Chip

Earlier in this story

The receipts

Trump says Super Pac will pay for taxpayer-funded ads that sparked outcry
The Guardianmainstream§

President’s U-turn comes after Democrats and Republicans condemned use of tax dollars for pro-Trump ads Donald Trump said on Monday he would pay for taxpayer-funded, pro-Trump ads “with money I raised for MAGA, Inc.”, a political action committee, after the television advertisements glorifying himself sparked a major backlash. In a…

Trump says his super PAC will cover taxpayer-funded ‘patriotic’ ads after backlash
Washington Examinerright§

President Donald Trump said his primary super PAC will start covering the administration’s taxpayer-funded political ads in the wake of bipartisan backlash. “The Radical Left is upset with the fact that I am taking Ads, which I consider to be a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A., and paying for them with U.S.A. money,”

· Impeachment Calls Grow as Dems Say Up to $20 Million in Taxpayer Funds Were Used for 'Illegal' Pro-Trump Ads from the morgue, 29 Sep 2026

· GOP senators push back on Trump’s taxpayer-funded ad from the morgue, 29 Sep 2026

· Lawmakers call for action on ‘plainly illegal’ taxpayer-funded ads to promote Trump from the morgue, 1 Oct 2026

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.