A day after the president said his super PAC would pay for the ads, which had drawn bipartisan backlash, officials said that he meant moving forward. A new taxpayer-funded ad aired Tuesday.
Page F5From§Eachthe early bird edition — 6 October 2026
Trump's super PAC agrees to pay for the ads Schumer now calls illegal coordination with Trump.
As it ran on the front
Reconciling the ledger here, the paperwork moves forward and the money doesn't move anywhere. On September 29, the Wall Street Journal reported, and Common Dreams carried the story, that the pro-Trump ads airing in the weeks before the midterms had been paid for out of Department of Homeland Security funds — Customs and Border Protection money, congressional Democrats said that day, running as high as $20 million. Two days later, on October 1, the Guardian reported that Representatives Jamie Raskin and George Whitesides had asked federal watchdogs to investigate; the Guardian's own headline called the spending "plainly illegal," and the piece quoted House Democrats describing the ads as the president's "narcissistic ego trips," funded by the public.
Tuesday the position changed, or the phrasing did. CBS and ABC both reported President Trump saying he would start paying for the ads himself, through his super PAC, after the bipartisan backlash. The New York Times reported the same day that White House officials clarified he meant the arrangement applies going forward, not to the roughly $20 million already spent, and that a new taxpayer-funded ad also aired that Tuesday.…
…(cont) So the refund starts tomorrow. That's the kind of refund a taxpayer would love to offer their own creditors, hon.
That same Tuesday, The Hill reported that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is demanding that two government watchdog agencies open an investigation and preserve records tied to the ad campaign — the underlying question of whether taxpayer dollars paid for government-sponsored campaign ads, and alongside it, a new question: whether the president and his own super PAC illegally coordinated on the arrangement.
That second question is the new entry in the ledger. A super PAC is supposed to operate at arm's length from the candidate it supports; that distance is the entire legal premise for why it's allowed to spend unlimited money in the first place. Schumer's letter asks whether that arm's length ever existed here, or whether the PAC is simply the account the ads get billed to once the first account gets caught.
The taxpayer paid the first invoice. Whoever reviews the second one gets to find out who, exactly, picked up the phone and told the PAC what to run.
“This is the oldest switcheroo there is: get caught spending the public's money on yourself, announce you'll stop, and nobody asks for the first twenty million back. Trump's "independent" super PAC paying for ads Trump told it to make isn't arm's-length anything, it's a laundromat. The taxpayer already covered the deposit; now Schumer wants to know who's covering the overdraft.”
“Look, a super PAC spending its own money on ads is about as American as it gets — that's free speech, that's Citizens United, nothing illegal about independent expenditures. Coordination? There's no coordination, the President simply told his PAC which ads to run and it ran them, which — okay, hearing that back, I maybe shouldn't have said it like that.”
Earlier in this story
- Trump agrees to stop charging taxpayers for his ads, starting after the $20 million bill already arrived. By Ruth · the noon edition, 6 October 2026
- Trump promises to stop taxpayer-funded self-glorification ads, then funds the same ads through his own super PAC. By Chip · the breakfast edition, 6 October 2026
The receipts
Trump says that he will no longer use taxpayer funds to pay for a pro-Trump ad blitz ahead of the midterm elections, saying his super PAC will now pay for them.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is moving to investigate President Trump for allegedly misusing taxpayer dollars to pay for government-sponsored campaign ads. Schumer announced Tuesday that he is demanding that two government watchdog agencies investigate and preserve records related to the administration’s effort to make…
President Trump says he'll start paying for the pro-Trump ads that have blanketed the airwaves in recent weeks, using money from his super PAC instead of taxpayer dollars.
· Lawmakers call for action on ‘plainly illegal’ taxpayer-funded ads to promote Trump from the morgue, 1 Oct 2026
· 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
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.