On September 28 this publication reported that the United States government had bought NFL airtime for a spot built from Trump's 2023 campaign speech, that the buy had grown from $14,000 to about $920,000 in three weeks, and that the realistic paths to stopping it were three: a Government Accountability Office opinion after the election, a tighter appropriations rider in December, or whoever wins in November. I wrote that the administration appeared to be betting on the third, and that each new spot was a test of whether anyone could make it stop.
undercounted the money by a factor of twenty and missed a path. The money was $20 million. The path was a federal courtroom in Manhattan, and the plaintiff who opened it was Robert Hunter, the Democratic nominee for House District 28 in the Alabama legislature, who had spent $1,812 on his own campaign and argued that a $20 million federal ad campaign attacking people like him was a competitor he could not match. On Sunday night, Judge Jennifer Rochon agreed, ordered the ads off the air at 6:45 p.m., and on Monday published a forty-page opinion that does something no congressional letter or GAO review was going to do before the election. It lays out, with timestamps, where the money came from.
The money, in the order it moved
The source is Section 90004 of last year’s reconciliation act, the One Big Beautiful Bill, which gave Customs and Border Protection money for “commemorating efforts and events related to border security.” Congress meant memorials and ceremonies. In November 2025 the Office of Management and Budget apportioned $500,000 to that line, which is roughly what memorials and ceremonies cost.
On August 7, according to a New York Times report the court cited and the government did not dispute, the president and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, met with Republican strategists about the midterms. The president showed them videos of himself, including footage that later appeared in one of the ads. After the meeting, he told OMB Director Russell Vought to find government funds to pay for the advertisements.
On Friday, September 19, at 6:15 p.m., CBP asked OMB to move $20 million into the commemorative events line, drawing on money appropriated for the following fiscal year. At 7:50 p.m., ninety-five minutes later, OMB approved it. The next day, a Saturday, CBP issued a $20 million purchase order to a firm called LMD Agency for a “National Media Campaign.” The order covered placement only. Someone else had already made the ads.
By 11 a.m. on October 8, tracking data submitted to the court showed 16,254 airings, 1.56 billion impressions, and $15.4 million spent. By Sunday night, when the judge acted, about $19 million of the $20 million was gone. The purchase order runs through September 2027. At least eight more ads were planned.
That is the entire paper trail, and it is short because the whole operation took one evening. A line meant for wreaths was turned into a national television budget between dinner and the late news, on a Friday, by two agencies answering to a president who had personally picked the footage six weeks earlier. The judge noted the speed, and noted the president’s own description of the practice: that using appropriated funds this way is a “standard thing to do.”
The ads, as the court catalogued them
There are five, and the list matters because the White House has defended them as patriotic public service announcements about the country. “The Country He Loves,” thirty seconds, in which the president lists his accomplishments and attacks communism and socialism. “Celebrating the Enduring Spirit,” sixty seconds, Mount Rushmore and the 250th anniversary. “Final Battle,” thirty seconds, the deep state, the sick political class, the fake news media, the one that ran during the NFL and that the court found nearly identical to a 2024 campaign ad with the sponsor line changed. “To the Great Proud People of Iran,” sixty seconds, on the military operations in Iran, featuring the secretary of war. “Maduro,” sixty seconds, on the operation to capture the Venezuelan president, built around a Marco Rubio speech.
Two of the five are war ads. The campaign that the White House described as reminding Americans to love their country spent CBP’s commemorative money telling them, in the weeks before an election, that the war in Iran is going well and the Venezuela operation was a triumph, which are the two claims the administration most needs voters to believe on November 3 and the two it has the most trouble documenting. All five say “Paid for by the U.S. Government,” and the court found that none of them tells a viewer anything about what the Department of Homeland Security does.
What the government argued, and what it didn’t
The Justice Department’s defense had two parts. The first was timing. In a filing late Saturday it said the campaign was ending Sunday night anyway, so the case was moot. The judge was unpersuaded for reasons she listed: ads were still scheduled to run Sunday, the purchase agreement was still in force, the final invoice was unpaid, the DHS declaration that no “additional” buys had been ordered after October 11 was unclear about buys already made, and nothing stopped the same two agencies from doing the same thing next week. “Defendants have provided no reasonable assurance that the challenged conduct will not recur,” she wrote, and then pointed to the ninety-five minutes as the reason to believe it could.
The second part of the defense is the one that matters to anyone who has followed this story since September, and it is an absence. On the question of whether the ads broke the law, the government did not argue. The opinion records it in one sentence: “Defendants do not contest that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits.” The plaintiffs’ claims were that the spending violated the purpose statute, which says appropriations may be used only for what Congress appropriated them for, and the publicity-and-propaganda rider that every appropriations act has carried since the 1950s. The court found the ads “purely partisan” under the GAO test this publication described two weeks ago, meaning designed to aid a party or candidate, and found that money for commemorating border security was not money for a midterm ad campaign. The Justice Department, given the chance to say otherwise, declined. It argued only that the judge was too late.
That is a different thing from losing. A government that loses an argument has made one. This one stood in front of a federal judge, with $19 million already spent on ads the president had personally selected, and chose not to defend the spending as lawful, because the alternative was to put a Justice Department lawyer on the record saying that the Final Battle spot was a border security commemoration. Nobody was willing to say that under oath. The White House had been saying it on television for three weeks.
After the order
The order took effect at 6:45 p.m. on Sunday, and according to the plaintiffs’ tracking, nearly 400 spots aired after that, including 193 runs of one ad during 60 Minutes and 198 runs of another during America’s Funniest Home Videos. By mid-afternoon Monday, “Maduro” had aired twenty more times and “Final Battle” eleven. The Justice Department filed an apology, explaining that its lawyers “did not become aware of” the order until Monday morning. The White House said DHS had not received notice in time to cancel the purchases, told the vendor to stop, froze future payments, and put the remaining allocation on hold. The plaintiffs did not ask for contempt. They asked for a status conference, which is the polite form of the same question.
Two statements from the weekend fill in the rest. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that any time the department can “brag about America, I’m all about it.” And the White House, on repayment of the $19 million: there are no immediate plans. The president said last week that his super PAC would pay for future ads. Nobody has proposed that it pay for the past ones. Senators Patty Murray and Chris Murphy wrote to Mullin on September 29 demanding the ads come down, the money be repaid, and six questions be answered within 48 hours, including who directed the spending and whether any ethics official reviewed it. The letter cited the September 19 apportionment as the “suspected” source. The court has now confirmed it. The 48 hours expired October 1.
What this changes, and what it doesn’t
Two weeks ago the honest summary was that the propaganda rider has no enforcement agency, that the GAO moves after the fact, and that the Hatch Act exempts the president. All of that is still true. What changed is that a plaintiff with standing found a statute with teeth. The purpose statute is law, with a remedy attached. Money moved from the object Congress named to an object it didn’t is a violation a court can stop in advance, and this one did, on the strength of a paper trail the government built in one evening and could not explain.
The limits are real. A temporary restraining order runs fourteen days. The government can seek to lift it, can appeal to a Second Circuit that has not always been kind to injunctions against this administration, and can, as the judge herself observed, find another line in another account and move the money again in ninety-five minutes. The $19 million is spent, and no mechanism in the opinion gets it back. The ads reached 1.56 billion impressions before anyone with authority said stop, and the viewers who saw “Final Battle” during a football game do not get a corrective spot. The campaign did most of what it was built to do.
What it could not do was survive a question under oath. For three weeks the administration’s position was that the spots were obviously lawful, obviously nonpolitical, and obviously the kind of thing any government does. Asked to say so to a judge, with the apportionment record on the table, the Justice Department said nothing about the law and asked for the clock. That is the finding, and it is the one that outlasts the fourteen days. The money for these ads was taken from an account for memorials, by a president who chose the footage himself, through a Friday-night transfer his own lawyers would not defend.