The Times can’t see why a man with $400 million on hand would spend somebody else’s $20 million. My wife has funded my trading account every quarter since 2019, so I can walk the paper through it.
I take my morning futures in the waiting room of my wife’s orthodontic practice. On Thursday the TV over the fish tank went to commercial, and there was the president in black and white, set to a song called “Love Me.” Renata at the front desk asked if it was for a cologne. It was one of the taxpayer-funded ads the New York Times wrote up on Friday. The paper says he told his budget director to find government money for commercials praising him, and $20 million came out of Customs and Border Protection.
What the Times can’t work out is why. His super PAC went into the fall with $400 million, and he billed the public anyway. To anybody with a Bloomberg keyboard it’s obvious. In my Lehman days the whole building ran on other people’s money, and it worked every single quarter except the last one.
Why the Taxpayer-Funded Ads Are a Clean Trade
Read the tape. On September 19 the budget office moved $20 million of border funds into a category called One Big Beautiful Bill Commemorative Events, and the next day the contract went to LMD, a marketing firm in Columbia, Maryland. That’s a one-day settlement. My own funding has a line like that. Janet’s accountant books my $15,000 a quarter under some heading on our joint return, and I’ve never asked what it says (he smiles whenever it comes up).
He calls the super PAC “my money that I control,” though donors put it there. I say the same about my account. And to be fair, he does spend it. More than $20 million has gone into Ken Paxton’s Senate race in Texas, where the candidate was recorded telling donors that the president’s convention dropped his numbers. So that’s twenty of his on Paxton and twenty of ours on himself. I know which name I’d rather be long.
A Covenant Nobody Has Tripped
Asked about the taxpayer-funded ads on Wednesday, the president gave the answer every funded trader gives eventually: “If somebody said that that’s wrong, I’ll gladly pay the money.” Janet got that exact covenant from me in 2019. Twenty-nine transfers later it has never been tripped, though her father has tried at two Thanksgivings. The president’s version came from John Thune, the Senate’s Republican leader, who said Monday that he liked the message but it shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars, ABC News reported. He might have a point. I haven’t modeled it. Still, that’s sell-side commentary. A covenant trips when the counterparty says so, and here the counterparty is the U.S. government, which is him.
An Audience of One Has a 100 Percent Open Rate
The taxpayer-funded ads ran on “Meet the Press,” a show the Times notes the president is known to watch. I don’t see the problem. Clear Alpha goes out to 204 subscribers, 38 of them on Janet’s staff, at an open rate of 11 percent. I read every issue twice, so the one reader who matters has never missed.
The Government Accountability Office, as PolitiFact laid out, reads the ban on publicity or propaganda as covering three things: self-aggrandizement, covert propaganda and purely partisan material. Every spot ends with “Paid for by the U.S. government,” so covert is off the table. That’s one of three cleared, and I’ve sized up on thinner. A Michigan law professor told the site, “All these ads do is aggrandize Donald Trump.” Correct. That’s the deliverable.
And before anyone emails me the phrase self-dealing, follow the cash. It left a border agency, passed through a marketing firm in Maryland and came back as television, and the only thing that reached the president was the ads. The desk had run this trade before. Kristi Noem, his previous Homeland Security secretary, starred in a campaign of more than $200 million out of the same department and lost the job over it. Right trade, wrong name on the ticket.
Janet came out between patients, caught the end of the spot and asked who was paying for it. I pointed at the screen, which said so. She gave me the look she gives the quarterly statement and went back in. The Times has his approval at around 37 percent, low and steady for months, and my read is that a man buying his own name at the lows with somebody else’s balance sheet has the cleanest trade in Washington. But what do I know?
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