Common Cause and other advocacy groups that sued the Trump administration to stop his taxpayer-funded public service announcements told the court yesterday that Trump failed to discontinue the announcements after a federal judge ordered him to do so.

A White House official told NPR:

The last PSAs paid for by the government aired yesterday [Sunday] evening. We did not receive notice from the court in time to cancel the ad buys. The PSAs will be paid for by outside groups moving forward.

As much as I’m in favor of saving the taxpayers money, Trump is hardly the first president to promote his agenda using government PSAs.  They’re a way to make the public aware of what the president is trying to accomplish, as well as highlighting things that are going well for the country and things citizens should be concerned about.  Here is an incomplete list of past presidents who did the same thing:

-George W. Bush’s Super Bowl ad linking buying illegal drugs to supporting terror

-Barack Obama’s ads promoting the Affordable Care Act

-And we all remember Joe Biden’s creepy, red-tinged prime time address.  While it wasn’t a PSA, it still used taxpayer funds to demonize Biden’s political opposition.

-Biden’s prime time ads hocking the safety and efficacy of the COVID jab, which turned out to be straight-up lies

Here’s one of the Trump ads everybody’s freaking out about:

You will notice some differences between the Trump PSAs and the others.  With the exception of Biden’s imitation of President Snow from The Hunger Games, none of the other promotions featured the president so heavily.  What can I say?  While our president has many fine qualities, humility isn’t exactly one of them. While self-promotion isn’t one of my favorite traits in a president (or anybody, for that matter), this man works so hard and has accomplished so much against such huge opposition, I don’t mind giving him a pass on that. The citizens of this country need to be educated about what he’s accomplished in order to make informed voting choices in the future, and if our media won’t do it, I guess he has to.

Regardless, they all either highlight the presidents’ favored initiatives or warn of dangers to the country, such as drugs, terrorism, and, in Trump’s ads, communism and a dishonest media.

This skirmish between the Trump admin and federal judges is just the latest in an all-out war between the will of the voters and what are essentially a cadre of unelected bureaucrats. Here are some of the things these judges have determined the President of the United States doesn’t have the authority to do:

-halt federal grant spending

-issue buyouts to federal workers

-transfer trans-identifying men out of women’s prisons

-grant DOGE and even his own Treasury Secretary access to internal Treasury records

-cut billions of dollars in fraudulent spending

-pause certain federal programs to investigate fraud

-suspend USAID workers who were spending billions orchestrating foreign coups and sponsoring transgender theater

-fire the head of the Special Counsel office

-limit immigration from countries hostile to the United States

-issue executive orders the left doesn’t like, such as the one ending birthright citizenship

-edit federal government websites

-determine which journalists are allowed in his own press pool

-investigate the Federal Reserve

-deport illegal immigrants

One of these jumped up rubber-stamps even ordered airplanes carrying people, many of them Venezuelan gang members, who had entered our country illegally to turn around halfway through deportation trips. This judge, Boasberg, had no way of knowing how much fuel the planes still had or how many flight hours the pilots had logged, so this order could have posed a serious safety risk. If it had been followed.

This particular judge has even been ordered by a federal appeals court to cease his harassment of the Trump administration:

🚨 HOLY SMOKES. Radical Judge James Boasberg got slapped down SO HARD for targeting President Trump that the Appeals court issued a WRIT OF MANDAMUS against him!

Boasberg has been found to be ABUSING his discretion.

“This federal appeals court pretty much SMACKED him down and said, you were wrong to hold them in contempt. They didn’t even violate your order!”

Boasberg has failed to block deportations under the Alien Enemies Act!

“An EXTRAORDINARY remedy that is the court ORDERING another court to do something because the government has no other option!”

“They accused this judge of abusing his discretion, of engaging in an improper, inappropriate investigation, of basically meddling in the executive branch’s ability to make decisions on national security issues.”

“And this all stems from that incident that I’m sure a lot of us remember when the Trump administration deported members of Trinidad and Tobago to El Salvador. A judge said, turn that plane around, or, you know, you can’t turn them over, bring them back. And then they didn’t.”

“And this judge found them in criminal contempt for not complying with his order. This federal appeals court pretty much smacked him down.”

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) April 15, 2026

I guess if you can’t beat him at the ballot box, just keep him tied up in pointless litigation until his term is over.

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