The Call to Action Was Cut

The advertisement that CNN reports ran during two of Fox’s NFL broadcasts on Sunday is thirty seconds of black and white. Donald Trump walks down a corridor lined with portraits and looks into the camera. It is, he says, “the final battle.” He will “demolish the deep state” and “throw off the sick political class.” The last frame says the spot was “Paid for by the U.S. government.”

NBC News, which reported the ad late on Sunday, found that it is nearly identical to a video Trump’s presidential campaign posted to Truth Social in January 2024. Two things are missing. The campaign logo is gone, and so is the closing line, “Join President Trump’s fight to save America.”

Those two deletions are worth more attention than anything left in. They are the whole of the White House’s legal position.

The defence, in the White House’s words

It is the third government-funded spot to surface in recent days. The first, which aired on Fox News on Wednesday night, set photographs of the President against a chorus singing “love me.” ABC News reported that it cost about $14,000 to air on Fox News and Newsmax. None of the ads identifies the account that paid for it, and the White House has not said.

A spokesperson called them public service announcements “about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending,” and “educational and unapologetically patriotic.” A second official, quoted by NBC News and ABC News, gave the argument in legal rather than patriotic terms: “The PSAs are clearly not political. The President is not on the ballot, and the ads don’t have a call to action.”

Every clause of that sentence is aimed at a specific test. To see which one, start with the law it is answering.

What the rider says

On Thursday the four senior Democratic appropriators, Patty Murray, Rosa DeLauro, Jack Reed and Steny Hoyer, wrote to the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, demanding that the first ad come off the air. Their authority is section 718 of division E of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026, which in their quotation reads: “No part of any appropriation contained in the act or any other Act shall be used directly or indirectly, including through a private contractor, for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by Congress.”

The sentence has been carried forward in some form since the early 1950s, and it has never defined “publicity or propaganda.” The definition has been supplied by the Government Accountability Office, the auditor Congress relies on to police its appropriations, and it comes in three parts.

The first is covert propaganda: material an agency prepares and circulates while hiding that it did so. The second is self-aggrandisement, which GAO has described as publicity “tending to emphasize the importance of the agency or activity in question.” The third is purely partisan material, meaning communication designed to help a party or a candidate that has no real connection to the agency’s official business.

One category disposed of by a caption

Covert propaganda is where GAO has actually found violations. In 2015, in decision B-326944, it held that the Environmental Protection Agency had broken the rider by using a social-media tool to push supporters’ accounts to post a message the agency had written, without the audience being told who wrote it. NBC News notes that GAO also faulted Bush administration communications for failing to disclose their source. The offence in each case was concealment.

“Paid for by the U.S. government” is the opposite of concealment. Whatever else these ads are, they are not covert, and the line that critics quote as a confession is, as a matter of appropriations law, a defence.

The second category, and the line that was cut

That leaves partisanship, and here the White House official’s sentence does its work. “The President is not on the ballot” answers the question of which candidate the ad could be helping. “The ads don’t have a call to action” answers the question of what it asks the viewer to do.

The one version of the “final battle” video that plainly did have a call to action was the campaign’s own. Its last line asked viewers to join the President’s fight. The government version ends before that line. Whether or not anyone intended it as a legal edit, it is the edit that the White House is now relying on.

GAO’s partisanship test has always been narrow. In a 2018 decision clearing the Department of Health and Human Services, it found no violation because the communications at issue were connected to the department’s official responsibilities and plainly attributed to it. An administration arguing that a patriotic message from the President is connected to the presidency is working with the grain of that precedent, not against it.

What is left is puffery

The third test fits the facts most naturally and has been enforced least. Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a 2014 Congressional Research Service report on the subject, told ABC News: “This advertisement looks like puffery.” A montage of the President set to singers repeating “love me” is difficult to describe as anything else.

But self-aggrandisement has rarely been the basis of a finding, because almost everything an agency says about its own work can be described as emphasising its importance. The doctrine exists; it has seldom been applied.

What a violation would trigger

Suppose GAO did find a violation. The consequence runs through a different statute. Money spent on a prohibited purpose was never available for that purpose, and in B-326944 GAO concluded that the EPA had therefore also violated the Antideficiency Act, 31 U.S.C. 1341(a)(1)(A). The remedy for that is set out in section 1351: the head of the agency “shall report immediately to the President and Congress all relevant facts and a statement of actions taken.”

When the agency is the Executive Office of the President, that is a report to the President about the President’s own advertising. The statute also provides for administrative discipline, and in section 1350 for a fine of up to $5,000 and two years in prison for an officer who violates it “knowingly and willfully.” That clause requires a prosecutor, and the prosecutors work for the same executive branch.

The appropriators’ letter asks for exactly the things the statute presupposes: that the ad come down, that the employees involved be disciplined, and “a full account and breakdown of all Federal funds used.” That last demand is the one to watch, because until the White House names the account that paid, nobody outside it can say which appropriation was spent, or whether it was available for this.

Who has said what

The objections have not come only from Democrats. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said public officials should not “spend public money on private ads for themselves,” and The Spokesman-Review reported that Senator Thom Tillis compared the practice to Viktor Orbán’s. Representative Thomas Massie called the latest spot “ominous.” Representative Jamie Raskin suggested it may amount to criminal theft of government property, a separate and much larger claim than the appropriations argument, and one no prosecutor has taken up.

No GAO decision on these ads has been reported. This publication could not open GAO’s own decisions database on Monday, which refused automated requests, and does not rely on it for anything beyond the two decisions cited above.

The law against government propaganda was written to catch an agency hiding its hand, or one campaigning for a candidate. These ads show their hand in the last frame, and their subject is not a candidate in November. What they lack is the one element a campaign ad needs and a public service announcement normally consists of: an instruction. There is nothing to sign up for, no number to call, no place to go. The spots ask the viewer for nothing, and in the White House’s reading that is the reason they are lawful.