Donald Trump used to buy TV ads to lure gamblers into his casinos and bolster his brand. Now he’s just using your taxpayer dollars.
If you watched TV this week, you might have seen ads of the president vowing to “rout the fake news media” and urging viewers to “love me,” followed by a strange new tagline: “paid for by the U.S. government.” That’s your money, and it’s paying for the latest vanity project the president has cooked up.
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the ads were funded through U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency that’s supposed to be guarding our ports and borders. By Sunday, the ads had aired more than 2,300 times on local stations alone. As someone who used to help run DHS, I can say without hesitation this is totally unprecedented and head-spinningly corrupt. Border money is supposed to be spent on the border, not on presidential self-promotion, and certainly not weeks before an election.
(Former Bush ethics czar Richard Painter went as far as to say it could be an impeachable offense.)
For me, the ads completed the image of Trump returning to his casino-hustler roots. He used to run gambling houses in Atlantic City. One of them was literally called Trump Castle, and its TV commercials serenaded gamblers with a jingle: “You’re the king! You’re the king of the castle!” (I have to thank the great Elie Honig for pointing this out to me. He remembered it from his youth in New Jersey and sent it to me some months ago. A real gem.)
That casino was apparently so strapped that Trump’s father sent a lawyer to the casino cage with a $3.35 million check to “buy chips,” which New Jersey regulators later called an illegal loan. A year later the Castle went into bankruptcy anyway. Back then, the jingle at least created the illusion that the customer was king, but in Trump’s new castle, the only king is Trump, of course, and the rest of us are peasants funding his lavish lifestyle, profligate spending, and self-dealing. Millions of No Kings marchers have already told him what they think of that arrangement.
Now the whole of the U.S. government looks like his own casino. Indeed, he’s added billions to his fortune since returning to office. Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure reported more than $1.4 billion in income from his family’s crypto ventures, including $635 million from sales of his $TRUMP meme coins. The president mints his own tokens and sells them to anybody with a wallet (including people who need something from his administration).
Like any good casino, there’s a high-roller room for those who can spend a little bit more. For instance, Qatar handed over a $400 million jet to please the president. Meanwhile, an Abu Dhabi investment firm used World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin to make a $2 billion investment in Binance, and a few months later Trump pardoned Binance’s founder. Surely just a coincidence.
There’s a cashier’s cage in this one, too. Individuals and corporations are finding a litany of ways to buy influence, and there’s a particularly concerning black box. When I sat down with former DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer for our upcoming documentary, CORRUPTIONLAND, she described “a feeding frenzy around the pardon process,” with “millions and millions” of dollars changing hands just to get a clemency application in the door. It’s unclear how the money is moving and whether other promises are being made in exchange for clemency. But it reeks of corruption. Meanwhile, Trump has been tempted to dip directly into the cash drawer himself, and he has sought roughly $230 million from his own Justice Department to compensate himself over past investigations.
Casino owners also love a renovation. We’ve all watched as Trump bulldozed the East Wing for a ballroom funded by donors who then pulled in billions in federal contracts… launched an almost billion-dollar makeover of the White House… ripped up the Reflecting Pool with a no-bid contract to a friend… defaced the Kennedy Center until a judge ruled it couldn’t be renamed for him without an act of Congress… tore up the public golf course in D.C. so he could remake it in his own image… broke ground on a gigantic arch in his honor… and draped his face over federal buildings across D.C., to name a few.
The only solace I get from all of this is that the story doesn’t end well for crooked casinos. Trump should know. In 2015, federal regulators fined his Taj Mahal $10 million, reportedly the largest such penalty ever imposed on a casino, after it admitted to failing to report suspicious transactions and keep proper records. Each of these schemes leaves a trail. Eventually, the auditor will arrive to count every chip in the king’s castle. That day is coming, and it will be a very bad day for Donald Trump.
Your friend, in defiance,
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