Vance Says Trump’s Ads Begging People to Love Him Are “Not Partisan”

Vice President JD Vance claimed Monday that Donald Trump’s taxpayer-funded propaganda videos are actually “not partisan.”

The Trump administration has used at least 5.6 million taxpayer dollars to buy a series of at least 15 campaign-style advertisements touting the president’s agenda ahead of November’s midterm elections—even though it’s illegal to use government funds for campaign purposes.

Speaking to the press ahead of his trip to Alaska, Vance tried to downplay the administration’s blatant law-breaking by claiming the television spots did not endorse any particular candidate or party.

“I’m sure that some people don’t like it, but if you look at the message of those advertisements, they’re not partisan, they’re not—you know, it’s not like we’re advocating for a particular candidate,” Vance said. “We’re trying to tell a story, I think, about how great the United States of America is.”

The vice president compared the advertisements to videos that the Obama administration produced about the Affordable Care Act. “You have the people’s government using tax dollars to advertise about what the government is doing,” Vance continued. “It’s part of actually, I think, living in the constitutional republic.”

In 2010, the Department of Health and Human services paid to produce short 30-second ads explaining the changes that the Affordable Care Act made to Medicare, including free check-ups, cancer screenings, and lower prescription drug costs. Not only did these videos have a clear public service function, but they were also not self-aggrandizing or partisan.

By comparison, Trump’s television spots are wildly partisan. One spot, called “King of the Jungle,” features images of Democrats targeted by the Trump administration edited alongside videos of lions hunting in the wild. Another, called “God Made Trump,” presents the president as a messianic figure. One ad called “Resilience” shows multiple moments in Trump’s life before he became president. And in another, the president begs voters to “Love Me.”

In order to make the videos, the Trump administration stole the money from the Department of Homeland Security, specifically from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

America’s FBI directors are expected to be fiercely independent. Kash Patel is not.

Instead, Patel appears to be completely under the thumb of the White House, bending over backward to enact the president’s retribution campaign, according to a new report by The Atlantic.

Whereas Patel’s predecessors have historically tried to create distance between themselves and the Oval Office, Patel reportedly receives numerous calls from the White House and its allies throughout the day. Some of his orders come directly from Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, or other executive branch officials, according to current and former officials who spoke with reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick.

“I’ve personally heard him say, ‘I have to do this for the White House,’” one former FBI official said.

The White House did not deny that Miller tells Patel and his agency what to do. Instead, it seemed to reinforce Miller’s broad influence over Trump’s executive branch, confirming that Miller “interacts with all law enforcement agencies on a regular basis.”

FBI Operations Director Joe Perez told The Atlantic in a statement that the bureau “receives referrals from a variety of places, assesses the facts of the allegation, documents the referral, and we make the decision whether or not to proceed accordingly under an authorized purpose as we have always done.”

Patel’s primary mission seems to be lending institutional credence to Trump’s 2020 presidential election conspiracy. Yet despite spending months repeating promises of supposedly imminent arrests, Patel has yet to produce actual results for Trump’s cause.

But the FBI wildcard has invariably escaped consequence from his MAGA boss, even in the wake of numerous controversies.

Over the last year, the podcaster turned agency chief has wantonly flown around the country with FBI jets on the taxpayer’s dime. His trips have included a jaunt to Las Vegas, a trip to Nashville, and at least one widely publicized instance in which he flew to Penn State to visit his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, who was performing at a wrestling event.

His alleged substance abuse issues have also caused problems. Patel ruffled feathers when he appeared at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, where he was caught on video chugging beer and whooping it up with the U.S. men’s hockey team. (He later insisted he was celebrating with his “friends.”)

In April, a federal judge threw out Patel’s defamation claims against a former FBI official, Frank Figliuzzi, who told MS NOW that Patel had “been visible at nightclubs far more” than he had been seen on the seventh floor of the bureau’s Washington headquarters.

Patel is in the midst of suing The Atlantic after the magazine published a damning report earlier this year about his alleged drinking problem, which reportedly goes “far beyond the occasional beer” and may be contributing to Patel’s erratic, paranoid behavior.

But Patel has nonetheless hung on to his credentials within the Trump administration. The windfall, according to a Republican operative who spoke to Fitzpatrick, is due to the fact Patel “is the only guy who never says no.”

“And the president likes that,” they added.

Meanwhile, Patel has been remarkably brash and cavalier while dealing with his critics. In response to three pages of detailed questions about his connections to the White House sent by Fitzpatrick, Patel responded: “I’m still looking for my gold-plated jet ski in the English Channel; you all know where it is. Free ride if you help me find it.”

Fitzpatrick noted that she had never asked or written about a gold-plated jet ski or the English Channel, writing that she “did not understand this response.”

However, a quick Google search turned up an MS NOW report from July about Patel that included an image of a jet ski. At the time, Patel had responded to the article via X, writing: “Nah, my jet ski is gold plated … dumbass.”

“Put simply, Patel responded to The Atlantic’s questions about the FBI’s election investigations by referring to a graphic that appeared on an unrelated news story on another media company’s website,” Fitzpatrick observed.

President Trump has the lowest approval rating in Kansas of any president since Herbert Hoover—who was widely blamed for causing the Great Depression. This is yet another ominous sign for Republicans ahead of what has become a midterm battleground for the Senate.

This comes in the midst of a neck-and-neck campaign between Democrat Reverend Adam Hamilton and incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall, with most polls showing them locked at 45 percent. This is the closest Kansas has been to flipping blue in nearly 100 years, making Trump’s historic unpopularity there a clear cause for alarm.

“President Trump is historically unpopular for a Republican president in the great state of Kansas.... I absolutely buy the idea that this [Senate] race is close because just take a look at these,” CNN’s Harry Enten said on Monday morning. “In his first time … Donald Trump had +5 points. Look at how much less popular Donald Trump is than he was in term number one at this point. He’s way down in the basement, 15 points underwater—that’s a 20-point shift away ... 16 less points popular than any other Republican president at this point in the term.”

Republicans are worried that Trump’s unpopularity will spill into the race between Hamilton and Rogers.

“It’s a very competitive state, more competitive than I’d like to see it,” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott said last week. “But the fact of the matter is that we’re going to win in Kansas.… It’ll be closer than I want it to be.”

Marshall isn’t really helping his case, either, as his tenure has been defined by timely waffling on ICE and controversy spurred by his past aggressive, high-interest medical debt collections during his time as an obstetrician-gynecologist.

“This to me is potentially a mathematic perfect storm,” Enten continued. “A historically unpopular Republican in Kansas and Donald Trump, and a historically popular Democratic Senate candidate in Adam Hamilton—that may be the equation that gets Kansas its first Democratic senator in 94 years.”

On her way out of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem may have gotten one of her donors a sweet deal.

President Trump fired Noem from the Cabinet in March over a series of scandals including how DHS handled contracts. But she didn’t leave the agency until her successor, Markwayne Mullin, took over on March 25. Just before she left, the department agreed to pay $108 million to Daedalus Aviation Corporation for a Boeing 737 private jet with a bar, two bedrooms, marble showers, and a table covered in manta-ray skin.

The firm had acquired the plane for less than $90 million, and it wasn’t the only plane deal DHS made to the corporation. The agency bought two more luxury jets from it for $106 million, far more than the $83 million the company paid for them. It also bought two 17-year-old 737s for $45 million each, more than their typical market value, according to The New York Times. All five of those planes were bought on Noem’s last morning at the DHS.

Daedalus’s chairman, William Walters, gave $10,000 to Noem’s political action committee, American Resolve, in 2024. After she was appointed as DHS secretary, Walters’s companies got over $900 million in agency contracts. DHS hired his business Salus Worldwide Solutions to fly Noem and her aides on chartered jets, as well as to encourage immigrants to leave the country voluntarily.

Daedalus was given a no-bid contract to acquire planes for deportation flights, acting as a middleman by buying planes from elsewhere and reselling them to the government.

When Mullin was confirmed as Noem’s successor, he looked into backing out of the deal but was worried about paying a financial penalty. Mullin spoke to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who was also concerned about the penalty. She told him not to block the plane purchases, and ultimately, he didn’t.

The planes DHS bought from Daedalus were mostly unused as of August. The whole deal smacks of Noem making money for a former donor and saddling American taxpayers with the cost, without any benefit to them or the government.

Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have used peace negotiations with Russia to concoct a multibillion-dollar deal to benefit their foreign business partners and political allies.  

In the latest installment of the most corrupt administration in history, the dynamic duo behind multiple botched peace agreements has secured a massive deal to purchase a series of oil fields, refineries, and gas stations owned by Lukoil, one of Russia’s biggest energy companies, The New York Times reported Friday. 

One private firm had already reached a tentative agreement to purchase Lukoil assets earlier this year, but that deal was stalled as a new group of investors emerged—each with direct financial ties to Kushner, Witkoff, and President Donald Trump.

The new group of investors is led by Todd Boehly, co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who donated $1 million to MAGA Inc. in 2025 and another $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee through Eldridge Industries, his investment firm. 

One major stakeholder would be an Abu Dhabi–based fund controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who oversees a fund called Lunate, which is among the largest stakeholders in Kushner’s shady private equity firm, Affinity Partners. Sheikh Tahnoon previously dumped $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm co-founded by Witkoff and majority-owned by the Trump family. Then the U.S. president lifted export restrictions on AI chips to the UAE. Nothing to see there, certainly. 

Another major stakeholder in the sale is a Qatar-based conglomerate controlled by Moutaz Al-Khayyat and his brother Ramez Al-Khayyat, who have helped finance Kushner’s shady luxury hotel project in Albania.

For Kushner and Witkoff’s friends, the best thing about this part of the peace deal doesn’t actually require any peace. The Trump administration has reportedly signaled that it is open to making deals with Russia before the war actually ends, and one person familiar with the matter told the Times that included the Lukoil sale. The potential deal stands to be extremely lucrative for the American buyers as the purchase would release the assets from Russian sanctions, causing their value to instantly increase. 

Hui Chen, a former Justice Department prosecutor and a white-collar crime and ethics adviser, told the Times that the deal was “an alarming and very concerning set of entanglements.”

“And it means you have to question how the Trump administration is evaluating the different bidders involved here. Are the personal interests involved going to wrongly influence the outcome?” Chen said.

News of this deal comes on the heels of a report exposing Kushner’s investment firm as the largest stakeholder in Phoenix Financial, a Tel Aviv–based firm that has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into companies that have seen massive gains as a result of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza. The president’s son-in-law has previously used his gig as special envoy as an opportunity to try to raise funds from foreign governments and individuals in the Middle East. 

And just one day before the Times report dropped, Kushner himself took to X to insist that he does not let his business dealings influence his diplomatic work.