"It is a three-minute riff on Paul Harvey’s famous “God Made a Farmer” speech, created by a pro-Trump meme group. It played at the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas last month. And like at least a dozen other ads now airing on national television, it ends with an unusual disclaimer: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.” According to the New York Times, those ads exist because President Trump personally told his budget director to find taxpayer money to pay for them. The money, the Washington Post found, came from funds Congress set aside for border security, drug interdiction and memorials for officers killed in the line of duty. The ads would be a scandal on their own. They are not on their own. They come from the same department that, under its previous secretary, Kristi Noem, steered more than $220 million in no-bid advertising contracts through a company created days before it won the work. In the same weeks they began airing, Trump started mailing checks to voters in battleground states and promised $5,000 to every adult if his party keeps Congress. His budget office moved to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars Congress had already approved, in a maneuver the Government Accountability Office has now found illegal. His Justice Department tried to create a nearly $2 billion fund by settling a lawsuit Trump himself filed. And all of it echoes a case from seven years ago, when a court ordered Trump to pay $2 million for misusing his own charity’s money for political purposes. Because if Democrats win the House in November, they will have subpoena power. Inspectors general, the GAO, state attorneys general and future prosecutors have their own tools. And the first step to accountability is knowing exactly where to look." Major Deep Dive: Trump Is Defying Congress' Power of the Purse. Here’s a Roadmap for Investigating His Misuse of Taxpayer Funds aaronparnas.substack.com/p/m…