As US midterm elections loom, Trump's campaign tactics are becoming increasingly unusual, and expensive

It's neither a joke nor fake news but a real report from earlier this week: Donald Trump has backed down. On Monday, the US president announced that a series of advertisements aired in September promoting him and his administration would no longer be funded with taxpayer money . "The radical Left is upset with the fact that I am taking ads, which I consider to be a positive promotion for our great USA, and paying for them with USA money," Trump wrote on his platform Truth Social. He went on to claim that funding partisan ads with public money was a "rather standard thing to do," before adding that future ads would be paid with money raised from donations. The ads themselves have caused some controversy in the United States .