EXCLUSIVE — A conservative labor group is targeting President Donald Trump and lawmakers directly, not voters, with a new advertising campaign, as both Republicans and Democrats fine-tune their messaging points ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

The ad campaign, paid for by the Coalition to Protect American Workers, will run this week in Washington across television and digital platforms and could be extended across the midterm election cycle.

The ad features artificially generated imagery of an exaggerated Washington swamp and crumbling federal buildings before cutting to brightly lit b-roll of Trump.

“The D.C. swamp is hostile to American workers. Take Joe Biden’s National Labor Relations Board — the NLRB. Biden used this group to give more power to his top allies, union leadership, putting political power over workers. Not anymore,” a voice narrates over the images. “Thanks to President Trump, it is a new day. Trump’s NLRB will put workers first, restoring fairness and freedom in the workplace. Thank you, President Trump, for protecting workers all across America.”

Gene Hamilton, senior adviser to CPAW, told the Washington Examiner that the group is focused on “putting American workers back in charge of their own future.”

“For too long, the system elevated political insiders over the people who actually do the work. We thank President Trump for his leadership and for restoring balance at the NLRB, protecting secret‑ballot elections, defending the right to hear from both sides, and ensuring due process,” he wrote in a statement. “When American workers have real information and a real vote, they win — and so does America’s economy.”

CPAW maintains extremely close ties to the Trump White House. The group was launched in 2021 by veteran Republican operative Marc Short, shortly after he departed his post as former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff during the first Trump administration. Hamilton simultaneously serves as the president of America First Legal, which he co-founded alongside White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller in 2021.

Last year, CPAW commissioned a survey from pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward, who provided support to Trump’s presidential campaigns, regarding nationwide labor unions, workers, and unionization.

The findings from that poll suggested that Trump and Republicans would gain a leg up in the 2026 elections by rolling back a National Labor Relations Board rule issued by former President Joe Biden, which aimed to provide labor groups with new negotiating leverage over employers by undermining so-called secret ballot elections.

The NLRB spent the entirety of 2025 virtually without a quorum, after Trump fired Democratic member Gwynne Wilcox from the board shortly after he entered office in January. However, the Senate confirmed new nominations to the board in late December 2025, and NLRB now appears poised to roll back much of Biden’s labor agenda in 2026.