Public Service Announcements

 My younger son and I settled in for a bit of football one recent afternoon, as we watched the Washington Commanders and the Seattle Seahawks offer up a hard-fought and remarkably entertaining game.  We were watching on broadcast, which is itself a rarity in these days of streaming.  As one must when watching broadcast TV, we made a point of muting the advertisements, as seeing the same things pitched at you over and over again gets a tiny bit tedious.

But one ad, I made a point of listening to.  

The moment it started, I knew it marked a historic shift in American broadcasting.   In it, Donald J. Trump walks glowering down a greyscale hallway.  In the background and over a soundtrack of ominous music, a recording from his last Presidential campaign played, as Donald declared that he's the leader in "the final battle," as everyone needs to rally around him to liberate America.  If you haven't seen it, here it is: 

The funding source for the ad: "Paid for by the U.S. Government."  

This isn't something you've seen before.  For the entirety of my lifetime, spending tax dollars to support a political campaign of the party in power has been fundamentally off limits.  The reasons for this are obvious.

Faced with criticism, the White House said: "The announcements are very clearly not campaign ads; President Trump is not on the ballot and there is no call to action."

Is this true?  Is this, objectively speaking, what you just watched?  

We know that the voiceover is directly drawn from a political campaign, and specifically attacks both political opposition and the independent press.  This is unquestioned and obvious.

We know, from the highly unusual Republican convention in Texas just a month before these ads were released, that Donald J. Trump wants voters to know that he's on the ballot, and that this upcoming election is a referendum on his administration.  He has publicly and repeatedly said those exact words.  

Is there a call to action?  Let's highlight the first person plural action verbs in the text you just heard:

This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists; we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.

It is self-evidently a call to action.  But White House Communications Director Steven Cheung says it isn't.

Instead, we are told to believe that it is a Public Service Announcement.  All of us know what those look and sound like, which is why we know that the White House...not just the president, but all those who serve him...is lying.  Not "spinning."  Not "reframing."  Just lying like an ill-bred child, as they violate one of the core shared moral norms that has governed how we use our collective resources.

 When our leaders lie to our faces, and we cynically accept that as business as usual, we are on a dark and treacherous path as a nation.  

As a reminder of what public service means, here's a Public Service Announcement, one that reminds us to be aware of what compulsive lying does to us, and to our integrity as persons and nation. Knowing is half the battle, eh?