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{"id":27311,"date":"2026-09-28T19:49:43","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T19:49:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/john-thune-taxpayer-dollars-shouldnt-fund-trump-ads\/"},"modified":"2026-09-28T19:49:43","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T19:49:43","slug":"john-thune-taxpayer-dollars-shouldnt-fund-trump-ads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/john-thune-taxpayer-dollars-shouldnt-fund-trump-ads\/","title":{"rendered":"John Thune: Taxpayer dollars shouldn&#8217;t fund Trump ads"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Senate Majority Leader John Thune took issue Monday with a new ad campaign featuring President Donald Trump that is being underwritten with federal funds.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt&#8217;s a great message. I like the message. But it shouldn&#8217;t be paid for with taxpayer dollars,\u201d the top Senate Republican told reporters.<\/p>\n<p>One of the ads that has aired in recent days is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/2026\/09\/27\/trump-administration-taxpayer-funds-2024-campaign-ad-01094567\" target=\"_blank\">virtually identical<\/a> to a 2024 Trump campaign ad except that the new version states it is \u201cpaid for by the U.S. government.\u201d Another <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/2026\/09\/24\/trump-administration-midterm-tv-ads-01091499\" target=\"_blank\">shows images of Trump<\/a> accompanied by a song titled \u201cLove Me\u201d and captions such as, \u201cAmerica will never be a communist country.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Thune (R-S.D.) noted that Trump has not specified where the funding is coming from. The White House has defended the ad campaign as a \u201cpublic service announcement\u201d akin to spots backed by previous presidents promoting things like Covid-19 vaccinations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Senate Majority Leader John Thune took issue Monday with a new ad campaign featuring President Donald Trump that is being underwritten with federal funds. \u201cIt&#8217;s a great message. I like the message. But it shouldn&#8217;t be paid for with taxpayer dollars,\u201d the top Senate Republican told reporters. One of the ads that has aired in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}