No matter how much television you’ve watched, you’ve almost certainly seen plenty of public service announcements. By definition, these commercials are designed to advance the public’s interests, usually by promoting causes related to safety and health.

Ads encouraging people to wear seat belts, steer clear of illicit drugs, curtail pollution and avoid drunk driving, for example, are classic PSAs. Some public service announcements even become cultural touchstones of sorts, such as Smokey the Bear telling Americans, “Only you can prevent forest fires.”

You don’t need to be an advertising expert to recognize the qualitative difference between a PSA and partisan, election-season propaganda, but the White House apparently expects people to believe they’re effectively one and the same. NBC News reported:

The administration is airing a new TV ad touting President Donald Trump’s accomplishments — featuring Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White praising him as the “toughest, most resilient person,” with music proclaiming “love me” — which it says is a “public service announcement” funded “by the U.S. government.” […]

Despite the political overtones, a White House spokesperson told NBC News that the ad was a “public service announcement.” The official argued the ad wasn’t political because Trump isn’t on the ballot in the midterm elections and the ad doesn’t have any call to action.

“These public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad,” the White House spokesperson added. “The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic.”

Whether the spokesperson was able to type this statement with a straight face is unclear.

There’s no great mystery here. The 30-second ad, which began airing this week, looks like a campaign commercial because it is: The spot, launched as the early voting window starts to open in earnest, is filled with images and video clips of Trump and his campaign slogans. It concludes with a Trump ally praising the president’s “toughness.”

The ad serves no purpose other than to celebrate and glorify the president, who’s eager to run election-season ads intended to generate enthusiasm among core Republican voters.

If Trump wants to use his deep-pocketed super PAC to pursue such a goal, that would make sense. But this week, the administration began using public funds to air political propaganda, forcing taxpayers to finance the White House’s closing message as the early voting period gets underway.

Calling a campaign ad a PSA does not make it so. We’ve all seen PSAs, and it’s obvious this isn’t one of them.

As The Washington Post reported, it is illegal under federal law to use funds for “propaganda purposes,” and the Government Accountability Office has said the prohibition applies to communications that are “purely partisan” and “designed to aid a political party or candidates,” which would seem to apply to this video, given the content and the context.

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, argued via social media that the ad could amount to, among other things, “felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes.”

Soon after, several Democratic lawmakers who serve on congressional appropriations panels — Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland — wrote a letter to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles demanding the administration immediately take the ad off the air.

“This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America, and it is an egregious and utterly illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars,” they wrote, adding, “The law is not complicated. You cannot use taxpayer dollars for political advertisements.”

The lawmakers similarly demanded that the White House “reprimand and discipline the federal employees who knowingly violated federal law” and provide Congress with “a full account and breakdown of all federal funds used to create and air this ad.”

The White House has not yet responded to the correspondence. Watch this space.

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