Sad!

[O]ver 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.

But that wasn’t the point. The Trump campaign said the ad buys were an attempt to reinvigorate and reassure the president’s supporters in the nation’s capital. “We want members of Congress and our DC-based surrogates to see the ads so they know our strong arguments for President Trump and against Joe Biden,” wrote Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director, in an email on Monday.

  Daily Beast

Odd use of campaign funds. But maybe not. Maybe they think even the base will abandon him if they don't make him look better.

[T]wo knowledgeable sources—one a Trump campaign adviser, the other an individual close to the president—said the D.C.-area ads had another purpose as well: to put the president himself at ease.

As much TV as he watches, I'm sure he'll see them often. He won't have the sense to ask where the ads are running.

In recent weeks, Trump has grown visibly distraught at his prospects for re-election, with recent polling showing his standing in the race declining dramatically. [...] Things have gotten so bad that after CNN came out with a survey on Monday showing Trump trailing Biden by 14 points, Trump’s campaign’s pollster crafted a memo—subsequently posted to the president’s Twitter account—accusing presidential pollsters of a deliberate effort to “counter the enthusiasm of Trump voters.”

He could have come up with that one himself.

These sources also said the campaign is hoping to counter-program recent ads by critics that have driven the president to public outbursts. The ads in question were the work of the Lincoln Project, a super PAC run by a group of dissident conservatives, and elicited furious reactions from the president’s Twitter feed. The Lincoln Project aired a recent, hard-hitting ad called “Mourning in America” on Fox News in the D.C. media market with the explicit goal of getting the president’s attention.

Seems like they put one out about every week and run it on Fox News. They must have deep pockets.

[A]ccording to George Conway, a Lincoln Project co-founder and the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, the group got the idea from the Trump campaign, and specifically from Brad Parscale, the former top Trump digital aide who now runs the president’s re-election effort.

“[H]is people had bought ads in the District of Columbia—which you don't do in a presidential election! There are no persuadable voters in the District of Columbia,” Conway said in a May interview with The Daily Beast podcast The New Abnormal, co-hosted by his fellow Lincoln Project founder Rick Wilson.

“That stuck in my mind,” Conway recalled. “I was thinking, ‘Well, why can’t you just run an ad on the cable provider for the White House, so that some certain individual would see it?’”

And here's their latest: