Trump Defies Court Order. Taxpayer Funded Propaganda Ads Continue

Oct 14, 2026 12:39 PM EDT, Wed

Team Trump reportedly aired publicly funded ads after court order to stop

A federal judge told the White House to stop airing the ads by Sunday night. So why did they continue on Monday morning?

By Steve Benen

Oct. 12, 2026, 3:06 PM EDT

In the wake of bipartisan criticism and polls that showed overwhelming public opposition to the White House’s use of taxpayer money to finance propagandistic campaign ads, Donald Trump began last week with an unexpected announcement: Going forward, the president said, his well-funded super PAC would start paying for the commercials.

It was a welcome development, although critics made the unavoidable argument that Trump still needed to reimburse Americans for what had already been misappropriated. Making matters worse, however, there were more fundamental questions about whether the president’s declaration was even true.

Indeed, there was ample evidence to suggest the White House continued to use public funds for the midterm propaganda days after Trump made a public commitment to stop. Against this background, lawyers for the Democratic National Committee took the matter to court, hoping a federal judge would prevent the president from improperly misappropriating (more) taxpayer money. A coalition, including the nonpartisan watchdog Common Cause, filed a related lawsuit soon after.

This proved successful. As The Associated Press reported, U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Rochon, responding to the coalition’s case, granted a temporary restraining and ordered the Republican administration to cancel any remaining television commercials that had been paid for with millions of dollars in taxpayer money.

In theory, that would seem to have resolved the matter, at least for the moment. In practice, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. The Washington Post reported:

A federal judge issued a temporary order Sunday blocking the Trump administration from airing taxpayer-funded campaign-style television commercials. But the administration blew past a Sunday evening deadline and ran two of the ads into the early hours of Monday, advertising data from AdImpact shows. […]

Two of the ads aired numerous times after the deadline passed at 6:45 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, according to data provided by AdImpact. The two ads ran during airings of various shows, including “America’s Funniest Home Videos”, “ABC World News Tonight” and CBS’s “60 Minutes”.

If this isn’t obvious, that the White House continued to spend taxpayer money on campaign propaganda last week after Trump said this wouldn’t happen is indefensible but not shocking. The president uses his social media platform on a nearly daily basis to publish statements that are plainly untrue.

But if the Post’s reporting is accurate and the president continued to run publicly funded ads after a court-issued restraining order, that’s a vastly more serious matter.

For now, the White House hasn’t yet commented on the details, so it’s not yet clear whether Team Trump deliberately ran the ads in spite of the judge’s order, or whether the administration will characterize this as some kind of bureaucratic error.

In the meantime, Common Cause is alerting the judge to the apparent fact that Trump’s taxpayer-funded ads ran many times after the court’s order. Watch this space.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

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