Perhaps it was on college football? Maybe Saturday Night Live? Or it could have been Fox News Sunday, where the administration thought it worthwhile to use government funds, a euphemism for the monies you and I (well, at least I) pay as taxpayers, to put commercials on the television. But they’re not political ads, according to Trump. They’re public service ads.

What public service did this remind you of? But it gets worse.

Trump recycled one of his advertisements from January 2024 when he was campaigning for re-election, except this time he claims it’s no longer political.

Is it the exact same ad this time? Of course not. In 2024, Trump’s campaign paid for it. This time, we paid for it to air.

The spot is the latest in a series of pro-Trump ads funded by public money. Some ethics experts have argued that the Trump administration is violating federal laws banning the use of taxpayer dollars for propaganda, and the ads have drawn criticism from both parties. The most recent ad, one expert argued, is a more flagrant violation given its prior use in the political arena.

Trump is pumping and dumping to get the MAGA faithful to turn out to vote in the midterms, under his theory that they might not be particularly enamored of his chosen candidates, but they still love him. And since he is the president, whatever he has to say is, by Trumpian definition, a public service and thus a public expense.

Not everyone sees it that way, even within the Republican Party.

There is a rule, a law actually, called the Hatch Act that prohibits this use of public monies, except it doesn’t apply to the president. But even if the president (and vice president) were subject to the prohibition, the claim is that it’s not political anyway.

The White House has defended the ads, saying in a statement it reissued Sunday that the spots are “public service announcements” that are “reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad.” The White House said that there was no “call to action” in the ads.

Then again, it’s unlikely that the president did this all by his lonesome, and that he used federal government employees in the process of creating and placing, and all the various acts needed to put this in front of Americans, in the process of airing these advertisements which you and I (well, at least I) paid for. While Trump may be exempt from Hatch Act violations, the nice folks on Trump’s our federal payroll are not.

As Senator Kennedy says, there oughta be a rule, if only there was some body that existed in the federal government to craft such a rule and enact it into law. Maybe we could call it a senate, or even, dare I say it, a congress?

But even if the Hatch Act applied, and even if there were a rule to prohibit the use of unappropriated taxpayer money to promote a single individual whose purpose is to garner support in an upcoming partisan election where things are looking bleak, who would enforce it? Did Senator Kennedy, not to mention Senators Thom Tillis and Bill Cassidy, give any thought to such a rule when confirming an attorney general who openly told them he would not act with independence, guided by law without fear or favor, but would serve his master?

But in the typical exercise of whataboutism, the White House argues that others did it, so they can too.

The White House website has a page dedicated to defending the new ads. The page lists examples of what it calls “public service announcements” funded by past administrations, including pro-war messages under Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ads from the George W. Bush administration about a Medicare law and the dangers of drug use, and the Biden administration’s campaign to encourage COVID-19 vaccination, are also cited.

Others contend that the rationalization falls short of the mark.

The defense is a weak one, [GWB administration White House ethics lawyer Richard] Painter said. In 2004, the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress now called the Government Accountability Office, found the Bush administration violated a federal appropriations law against propaganda because its ads portrayed the Medicare law as a boon to the elderly.

The problem of the moment is that despite the debate over the propriety of these ads airing on the public dime, they’ve already run, the taxpayers have already paid for them and there isn’t a damn thing anybody is going to do about it other the bitch and moan. That may be the real PSA here, and it’s a public service that American taxpayers are made aware of it.