“Do You Love Me?”: Trump and Vance Beg for Votes, Afraid of Defeat

A president who asks the people through their television, “Do you love me?” has left the dignity of the office behind and entered the waiting room of desperation. That is exactly the ad Donald Trump is running right now, paid for out of the Department of Homeland Security’s budget, $20 million, and in violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from using public funds for partisan political advertising. His administration coyly calls them “public service announcements.” What they mean is propaganda, in one case set to a song the artist never authorized. Another ad invokes the “final battle.” Campaign advertising, then, disguised as a service to the public and paid for by the public, whether they like it or not. Corruption and kitsch in the same ad - you have to work at pulling that off.

The violation of the law is not sitting at the edge of this story, it is the foundation of it. For decades, the Hatch Act has separated public office from campaigning so that no president can turn the public treasury into his own advertising agency. That is exactly what is happening here, in plain sight, and the bill is being paid by the Department of Homeland Security, which is supposed to protect the country, not the man at the top of it. Only a fraction of the money has been spent so far, which sounds more like a threat than reassurance. More versions are certain to come, especially since the president is reportedly personally involved in designing them. Picture the most powerful man in the world personally tweaking the ads and checking whether the plea for love sounds moving enough.

This does not look like strength. The opposite is closer to the truth, the admission of a man whose cause, if it is not finished yet, is already sitting in boiling water. A barrage of propaganda that is almost certain to backfire. Affection you have to spend millions trying to buy is usually already gone. Nobody throws a fortune at the question “Do you love me?” when the answer is settled and favorable. The whole thing has the feel of a fundraising gala, the head of state as host, smiling into the audience and asking for approval, except the donation here is your own vote and the studio is the entire country.

The campaign has not brought him good news. Hardly anyone outside the administration and its loyal following has defended it. Even the press is refusing the dutiful “both sides” routine this time. As with his 25-minute prime-time address in July, it seems to understand what is happening. The power he held over people and institutions 15 months ago had vanished, people said at the time. The new ads show little else. That power rested above all on fear, on the ability to intimidate broadcasters and lawmakers. It evaporates as soon as the numbers fall, and they are falling.

His own party is squirming too, with reactions ranging from evasiveness to outright condemnation. Even Republicans in Congress fear the ads may violate the rules governing public service announcements. Majority Leader John Thune likes the message, but says it “shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars.” That was the nicest response. Senator Mike Rounds said he would not have done it. The outgoing Thom Tillis compared the whole thing to Viktor Orbán. “I hate it,” he said, without mincing words. When a member of your own party compares your president to a Hungarian autocrat, this stopped being a matter of taste a long time ago.

“Pretend I’m on the ballot, because if we don’t win, the Democrats are going to impeach me.”

It does not stop with the ads. Trump plans to spend 32 of the next 35 days on the road campaigning for his people. But the destinations reveal more than he would like. Instead of heading into the battleground states, he is traveling to conservative strongholds like Alabama and Oklahoma. Ohio and Texas are on the list too, even Alaska, an investment of time and resources that shows how serious the situation is. One major donor put it dryly: there are fires everywhere right now. You do not work your safest fields when the harvest is secure. And Trump is not heading out alone. His vice president, J.D. Vance, is also touring the strongholds and campaigning for a second chance of his own.

In Durant, the fear came right out into the open. “Pretend I’m on the ballot, because if we don’t win, the Democrats are going to impeach me,” he said. A man asking his supporters to vote for him even though his name is nowhere on the ballot is confusing a midterm election with a life preserver. The begging has an obvious reason, and its name is not patriotism. Its name is naked fear for his own skin.

Read also our article: Documentation Part 1: “Pretend I’m running”: Trump’s campaign against his own impeachment

Power and pleading do not sit well together. A ruler who asks whether people love him has already traded commanding for begging. Not long ago, a threat was enough where today a paid ad begs for affection. You can hear that decline in every second of airtime. You do not govern a country through love ads, at best you use them to manage your own exit.

“Give us another chance. Give us another couple of years.”

The candidates themselves are now saying that being close to him is hurting them. In Texas, Senate candidate Ken Paxton told donors that Trump’s strange convention in early September, held in the state specifically to help Paxton, had done the opposite. “Our numbers dropped. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, not good.” It was recorded secretly. In a private gathering of 12 people, someone must have been sitting there who despised him enough to leak the recording. A convention staged specifically for one man that drives his numbers down is an own goal of rare purity.

Paxton’s recording is the small-scale version of a much larger movement. Republican strongholds are wobbling everywhere while former Trump voters feel the consequences of government failure in their own lives. Every day, Republicans put more distance between themselves and him and even contradict him where it hurts him most. On Wednesday, West Virginia Senator Jim Justice broke with the president over mass deportations, the president’s favorite project. “Maybe we’re doing something wrong here or there.” No kidding. A year ago, a sentence like that would have triggered a presidential rage and a campaign against the dissenter. Now neither happens, and everyone in Congress is quietly calculating how much longer they want to stay tied to this man.

James Talarico, a Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives and a candidate for the U.S. Senate, is practically bankrupting the Republican Senate Leadership Fund single-handedly. The Super PAC tied to it spent around $131 million within 17 days to prop up Republican candidate Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race.

All year long, as his numbers kept sinking to new lows and his party’s hopes sank with them, the question remained what might stop the collapse. A negotiated memorandum between Washington and Tehran could briefly have offered him a way out of his war. Nothing came of it. To save themselves, Republicans would have to do what they are incapable of doing, improve people’s lives and fix the economy. Instead, they keep praising their “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a law under which the richest make thousands of extra dollars while everyone else gets some form of pain. An ad can cover up a lot, but it cannot cover up an empty refrigerator at the end of the month.

On the stage of the Conservative Partnership Academy in Washington, at the podium with the golden inscription “The 2025 Bellator Awards”, the former chief strategist of Donald Trump stood before a room full of like-minded people and spoke a sentence that, in its honesty, reveals the whole truth about this movement. If they lose, they go to prison. Some of them, at least. Him included. (November 6, 2025)

And so a president begs for the love of the taxpayers with their own money and calls it campaigning. First you take something away from people, then you ask them through their television whether they still like you. No one asks that question from a position of power. It sounds like the whimper fear makes just before the numbers spell it out in black and white on November 3.