Trump says he'll pay for TV ads that praised him and which government funded

NEW: Trump says he will personally pay for TV ads praising him and his presidency, after reports he instructed his budget director to use up to $20 million in taxpayer money to fund them ahead of the November elections.

Trump says he'll now pay for the TV ads praising Trump.

Those ads have been running for weeks ahead of November's midterms, and the New York Times reported he personally told his budget director to fund them with up to twenty million dollars of taxpayer money. The cash reportedly came out of Customs and Border Protection, moved on September nineteenth into a budget line called One Big Beautiful Bill Commemorative Events. You can't make that name up.

AdImpact tracked about nine point seven million already spent. Senator Maggie Hassan says the ads look like straight propaganda for a political party, which federal law forbids, and Public Citizen has asked regulators to pull them off the air. The White House calls them public service announcements.

So now Trump says MAGA Inc will cover the ads going forward. What nobody has answered is whether the nine point seven million taxpayers already paid ever comes back.

This is Sara White, reporting for HIT.