‘Nearly Every Claim Uttered in These Ads Is False’

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has joined other Democrats this week in demanding answers about President Trump’s midterms campaign ads — which promote nothing but himself — and the apparent use of taxpayer dollars to finance them.

I wrote earlier this week about the top Democratic appropriators in Congress calling for investigations into the ads and confirming reports that the White House moved some $20 million in taxpayer funds out of the Department of Homeland Security to bankroll the vanity project. Raskin and Rep. George Whitesides (D-CA) sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) on Tuesday to look into the reported shuffling of funds.

“Accordingly, we are writing to formally request that the GAO investigate the source, accounts, and total amount of taxpayer funds used by the Executive Office of the President to produce and distribute this advertisement across major television markets and official White House social media channels,” Raskin and Whitesides wrote in the letter to acting Comptroller General Orice Brown and special counsel Charles Baldis.

The two are asking for a formal investigation into how much the advertisements cost, how they have been paid for and whether any federal laws were broken in either the creation of the ads or the use of tax dollars to fund them. Raskin and Whitesides asked both agencies to look into whether the ads are a violation of the Hatch Act, the Anti-Deficiency Act, the Consolidated Appropriations Act or other federal criminal statutes.

“The Trump Administration knows what they are doing is unlawful, as evidenced by their halfhearted attempts to defend their actions. An anonymous White House spokesperson called the ads ‘educational,’ and suggested that they are ‘clearly not political’ because the ‘president is not on the ballot,’” the lawmakers wrote. “Yet just a few short weeks ago, at his poorly-rated Republican National Convention, President Trump pleaded for his rapidly dwindling ranks of supporters to vote, begging them to ‘pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.’ The White House can’t have it both ways.”

The lawmakers also, amusingly, fact check many of the claims Trump makes in the ads to argue that they could not possibly serve as “public service announcements” — like those made during the COVID-19 pandemic — as the White House has claimed.

“President Trump is obviously desperate for the American people to ‘love’ him, a problem that goes beyond your jurisdiction,” they wrote. “But stealing taxpayer dollars to pay for Mr. Trump’s narcissistic ego trips is plainly illegal. Your agencies have an important responsibility to hold accountable members of his Administration who violate the laws and policies under your purview.”

Raskin and Whitesides join their colleagues Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Henry Cuellar (D-TX) as well as Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) in asking questions about what exactly is going on with the egregious shuffling of funds for the ad campaign, seemingly designed to help Republicans win races next month (even though many vulnerable Republicans are trying to put a 10 foot pole between themselves and Trump’s political toxicity at the moment). The top Democratic appropriators are concerned about this because it appears as though the money was moved and used for something outside of its congressionally appropriated purpose — taxpayer dollars that were allocated for Customs and Border Protection in Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill” last year.

The ads have run on major airwaves in recent weeks including Fox, Newsmax, MS NOW, and CBS, and also during NFL games over the weekend.

Obviously, Democrats are concerned about the corruption and violation of federal law. But this trend of Trump inserting himself into the midterms because he’s worried Republicans are going to lose a chamber of Congress simply because he is not on the ballot — and Republican stumbling as they alternately embrace the administration’s failing policies and distance themselves dramatically from the unpopular president — has been a rare moment of levity in our current hellscape.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is being accused of running away from a bipartisan effort to hold an impeachment vote on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. 

Democrats are taking a convoluted, complex provision that was included in Republicans’ Big Beautiful bill to pin the blame for the national boom in data center construction squarely on Republicans ahead of the midterms.

President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is most widely known for making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, and offsetting the cost of those tax cuts by gutting social safety net programs for America’s most vulnerable. But the legislation did a lot of other seemingly anodyne things. For one, the bill expanded and made permanent an IRS tax incentive program that began in 2018 to encourage and support economic growth and job creation in rural areas.

During President Trump’s first term, the IRS designated certain “economically distressed census tracts” as Qualified Opportunity Zones in order to spur economic growth in those areas. Under the program, investors can receive tax breaks for job creation in rural parts of the country, according to this IRS fact sheet (might come as a shock but I do not have any prior knowledge about QOZs, as the IRS refers to them, and had to do some research to write about this particular part of the tax code 🫠).

Anyways, House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-MO) was a champion of making these tax credits permanent and expanding incentives for rural development, and oversaw getting provisions about the IRS program worked into the Big Beautiful Bill that Trump signed into law last summer. Republicans at one point championed the expanded tax benefits included in the bill as an opportunity for more data center construction in rural areas, according to Politico.

But that was a different time when opposition to data centers wasn’t known to be the one issue uniting Americans across the political spectrum, which my colleague Josh Marshall and I have written about a bunch in the past few weeks. Republicans are now struggling to message on the issue as the head of their party, President Trump, makes it impossible for them to hold any nuanced position on the matter — and therefore speak to voters’ outrage about the data center explosion.

Democrats are leaning in to this.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) launched a new rhetorical flex over Republicans on the increasingly bipartisan issue during his news conference on Monday.

“Every single House Republican but one or two voted to unleash data centers on the American people in an unfettered fashion,” he said.

The details of what Republicans actually did to expand the tax incentives are incredibly in the weeds, but the Wall Street Journal has a good rundown from summer 2025 here, and so does the Brookings Institute.

But Democrats’ messaging about the expanded program and Republicans’ interest in expanding it for the purpose of big tech development is catching on, per Politico:

The next day, a senior House Democrat — Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts — made a similar observation on the chamber floor.

“A year ago, Republicans were bragging about giving tax breaks to Big Tech in order to build data centers,” McGovern said. “With November on the horizon, some House Republicans are acting as if they did not turbocharge the data center build-out.”

Comer Claims McConnell Will Be Back for Next Session

Rep. James Comer (R-KY) told CNN that the senior senator from his state will be back to his duties in the Senate at the start of its next session on September 14. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has not performed his work duties in months and was hospitalized in mid-June. It took weeks for his office to share information about the hospitalization.

After conspiracy theories swirled online about McConnell being secretly … not alive anymore, the Democratic governor of Kentucky Andy Beshear began calling on the senator to give Americans some sort of proof of life and update on his health. Reports surfaced that he may have suffered some sort of cardiac episode at his home in June. In July, McConnell announced that he had been hospitalized after a fall and was in a rehabilitation center. He was discharged in early August.

“I have not talked to Leader McConnell. I’ve talked to his staff, many of whom are from my district originally. And they have all said it’s their goal for Senator McConnell to be here when the Senate comes in,” Comer told CNN Thursday.

No One Wants to Go to Trump’s Fake Convention Part 2

ABC News has more reporting today on Republicans who are up for reelection this fall — and even some in solidly red districts — skipping out on the Republican Party’s unconventional midterms convention in Dallas later this month. That’s primarily because they want distance from Trump, who is set to headline the event with an anticipated speech spinning his deeply unpopular record so far this term.

Yesterday’s edition of Where Things Stand had the details on Politico‘s survey of nearly 70 Republican candidates and members of Congress. The majority of them said they’re skipping the affair.

ABC spoke to a handful of the most vulnerable House Republicans, and they all said they didn’t plan to attend or were still undecided. About 100 Republican members of Congress and candidates are expected to make the trek — and shell out the $25,000 to $100,000 that each attendee has been asked to contribute to the House Republican campaign committee in order to attend.

Vance’s Subtle Dig

Vice President JD Vance hosted the White House press briefing Thursday, since no one has been hired to replace Karoline Leavitt since she decided to leave the Trump administration. Reporters asked him about his ongoing friendship with Tucker Carlson, despite the former Fox News host’s stark criticism of major elements of Trump’s second-term agenda. He responded saying he was bothered by people who stopped being friends with his wife when he was chosen as Trump’s running mate, but his response also appears to contain a subtle dig at Trump, who throws literally anyone and everyone under the bus for any perceived double crossing.

“Tucker is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things,” Vance said. “And I’m not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them.”

Read This From TPM Today

Hunter Walker checks in on Vice President JD Vance’s adventure into filling in a White House press secretary this afternoon. He repeatedly contradicted himself about whether or not the U.S. is, in fact, at war with Iran: White House Iran War Denialism Reaches Absurd New Level in Briefing Where Vance Both Confirms and Denies Bullets Are Flying

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