$400K Local DC Ad Buy Is Meant To Cheer Up Trump

The Daily Beast reports:

With their boss growing increasingly agitated with the state of his re-election campaign and with the efforts of Republican critics to undermine it, President Donald Trump’s team hatched a plan. They’d run a series of hard-hitting ads and place them on networks that they knew the president and congressional Republicans would watch.

And so, over the past month, the Trump campaign has spent slightly more than $400,000 on cable news ads in the Washington, D.C., area, buying time largely on Fox News but with some smaller buys on CNN and MSNBC as well, according to filings with the Federal Communications Commission.

The ads began running in late May and are scheduled through June 23. It is, on a purely electoral level, a remarkably quixotic use of campaign cash. The purchases have no real shot of moving D.C., Maryland, or Virginia into the Trump column.