Washington warned us about men like this —and even Republicans are appalled

U.S. Senator John Neely Kennedy (R-LA) reacts as he speaks with members of the media outside the Senate chamber, following a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump

Turn on Fox “News” at night this week and you’ll see something no American has ever seen before but Russians would immediately recognize.

Images of the American president flash across the screen while a singer repeats the words “love me” over and over, Trump’s voice promises to defeat “communism, socialism and Marxism,” UFC boss Dana White calls him “the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met,” and then, at the bottom of the screen, six words appear:

“Paid for by the U.S. government.”

Mediaite has confirmed that the ad ran through three shows on Fox but the White House says it’s all fine because it’s a “public service announcement” that’s “educational and unapologetically patriotic” and “clearly not political” because “the President is not on the ballot.”

The singer, JMSN, says he never authorized his song for “ANY political agenda or campaign.” Even Republican Senator Thom Tillis said using taxpayer dollars like this “feels like Viktor Orbán” and John Kennedy of Louisiana said he doesn’t “like to see politicians use public money to pay for their own campaign ads.”

Even more astonishing, this bit of state-run, taxpayer-funded propaganda that promises to destroy communism aired the same day Trump was rolling out a literal red carpet for Xi Jinping, an actual communist.

We’re finally reaching Full Putin here in America; with the “paid for by…” admission, this is the latest and most blatant example of Trump using the property, money, and machinery of the United States government to build a personal cult around himself and his billionaire buddies.

This pathetic, strongman-style self-aggrandizement isn’t new for Trump, of course, other than the admission in black-and-white type that our tax dollars are funding it.

— Back in 2020, Trump demanded his signature be prominent on the pandemic stimulus checks Congress appropriated to keep the economy afloat.
— When puppy-killer Kristi Noem budgeted $200 million for ads featuring her on horseback, she told a crowd at CPAC that Trump told her, “I want the first ad, and I want you to thank me.”
— Three-story banners of Trump’s face went up on the Agriculture, Labor, and Justice Department buildings in Washington, and Senator Adam Schiff’s office documented at least $50,000 in taxpayer contracts to pay for them.
— The State Department put his portrait and signature inside our U.S. passports, the first living president ever to appear there.
— The Treasury is now minting a gold-colored dollar coin with his face on it, even though federal law says only a dead person’s likeness can appear on our currency and the bipartisan coin advisory committee refused to review it.
— His name was slapped on the Kennedy Center, on TrumpRx.gov, on the Palm Beach airport, on “Trump accounts,” and on a “Trump class” of battleships, among other things. Now he’s reportedly considering renaming Fords’ Theater where Lincoln was shot.

This nation’s Founders warned us, repeatedly, about exactly this sort of presidential self-aggrandizement.

When Congress wrote the very first Coinage Act in 1792, the Senate’s version called for the president’s head to appear on our money, just as the king’s did in England. George Washington, then the president, wanted no part of it, calling it a “monarchical act.”

He then used his Farewell Address to warn about future “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who would use the power, wealth, and levers of government to “subvert the power of the people.” As a result, the House version (which became law) of the Coinage Act specifically calls for “an impression emblematic of liberty” rather than a living president.

John Adams said we were to be “a government of laws, and not of men,” and Ben Franklin said he’d helped to create “a republic, if you can keep it.” Those men had put their lives on the line to create America, and now Trump is committed to destroying this republic and replacing it with a form of government like his mentor and owner, Putin, has created for himself in Russia.

There’s the presidency, and then there’s the president. In a strongman state they’re the same; in a democratic republic they’re very different things.

Previous presidents understood that they were temporarily occupying that office and saw it as their sacred trust to preserve our republic. But now we have a guy — and a shockingly large entourage of lickspittles, brown-nosers, and sycophants — who’re not only destroying our reputation and power around the world but gutting our democracy itself here at home.

We’ve all seen how this has played out in other countries over the past century.

Pravda telling Russians how to think, Lenin’s picture in every classroom, songs praising Stalin sung by a government choir and played on state radio, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s faces on banners on their governments’ buildings, Mao putting his visage on everything a Chinese citizen could see or touch, Ceaușescu showing reels of himself every night on Romanian television…

When we saw those things, we immediately recognized them for what they were: signs of tyrannical cults of personality that had seized sovereign governments and twisted them into instruments of personal wealth and self-aggrandizement. We called them either communists or fascists, but knew for sure they weren’t small-d democrats.

Now our government — the American government, funded with our tax dollars — is going down this same deadly-to-liberty road.

Congressman Jamie Raskin — a constitutional scholar — says these ads are a clear violation of the Hatch Act that makes it a crime to use government facilities or resources for political purposes. Republican Senator John Kennedy objected, and Republican Senator Thom Tillis said:

“It’s inappropriate. It’s not like they need a GoFundMe page to have the dollars to do that sort of ad and they could do it. But using taxpayer dollars, it feels like Viktor Orbán.”

And it is. Orbán had spent hundreds of millions in Hungarian taxpayers’ money to promote himself with “public service announcements” like this, as does Putin on an almost daily basis. Both of them — like pretty much every other dictator in the world — tried to normalize the idea that the state and its leader are the same thing.

And that’s the damage here.

Tens of millions of Americans are being taught, by their own government, that this is what a president is supposed to do.

A generation of MAGA voters is learning that loyalty to one man is the same thing as patriotism, that the American Treasury funded by us taxpayers is really his to spend on his own self-promotion, and that ignoring the law is the prerogative of billionaires (particularly when they’re in elected office).

If this isn’t both stopped and spectacularly repudiated, that lesson could take a generation to unlearn, and Trump has more than two years left in office to keep teaching it.

Every one of these encroachments — the coin, the passports, the banners, the ads — will have to be undone by future presidents and Congresses, and the law must be fixed so that no president can ever commit these kinds of crimes against the ideals of America again.

There is already law on the books: much of what Trump is doing is already either a civil or criminal violation. Every appropriations bill for decades has barred spending federal money on “publicity or propaganda,” and the Government Accountability Office found the Bush administration broke that law when it secretly paid Armstrong Williams to promote No Child Left Behind and Bush’s association with it.

Jamie Raskin, who’ll chair the House Judiciary Committee if Democrats win in November, has already called the ad “blatantly unethical under numerous federal ethics provisions” including the Hatch Act.

What’s missing right now is a Congress and Justice Department willing to investigate or enforce any of it, and a press corps willing to treat this as the constitutional violation that it is rather than as just another one-day “Trump will be Trump” curiosity.

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