In her first briefing as White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt said she was “committed to telling the truth from this podium every single day.” Moments later she announced that the new administration had blocked a $50 million contract for condoms in Gaza.
“That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money,” she said.
It was also a preposterous claim, improbable on its face and quickly debunked. There were millions in federal grants awarded to prevent sexually transmitted diseases in Gaza, but in the province in Mozambique, not the Palestinian territory.
The condoms claim went viral anyway, seeping into the political discourse that President Trump has used to justify his sweeping push to slash the federal government.
Mr. Trump’s first four years in the White House were filled with false or misleading statements — 30,573 of them, or 21 a day on average, according to one tally. Back then, though, aides often tried to play down or contain the damage of egregious falsehoods.
This time, Mr. Trump is joined by a coterie of cabinet officials and advisers who have amplified them and even spread their own. Together, they are effectively institutionalizing disinformation.
While it is still early in his term, and many of his executive orders face legal challenges that could blunt the impact of any falsehoods driving them, Mr. Trump and his advisers have ushered the country into a new era of post-truth politics, where facts are contested and fictions used to pursue policy goals.
Mr. Trump justified the pardons of hundreds of rioters convicted of the violence, including assaults on police officers, at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by maintaining that “they didn’t assault” anyone. He attacked Canada, a NATO ally, by claiming fentanyl was pouring across the border, when in fact less than 1 percent of the drug was traced to the country last year.
Brooke Rollins, Mr. Trump’s agriculture secretary, boasted on X that she had canceled a $600,000 contract to study the menstrual cycles of transgender men, when in fact the grant financed a study on using natural fibers like cotton, wool and hemp in feminine hygiene products.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the vaccine skeptic who now runs the Department of Health and Human Services, claimed that the measles vaccine routinely kills people every year, though scientists say that is false.
Audrey McCabe, an analyst at Common Cause, a nonpartisan government watchdog, said the administration had pursued a strategy of “disinformation overload” that was overwhelming not only its opponents but also the judicial system.
“How do we push back on this when it’s coming from someone who was elected as president and those he’s decided to have close to him?” she said.
False narratives that once percolated in the darker corners of the internet are now advanced by Mr. Trump and his appointees and amplified by a media echo chamber, muddying the political discourse and compounding a broader erosion of trust in institutions themselves.
Elon Musk, the technology executive leading a crusade against federal spending, has repeatedly spread disinformation, including the claim about the condoms for Gaza. He has acknowledged mistakes but presses on unchastened.
He more recently called Social Security “the greatest Ponzi scheme of all time,” implying that one of the most popular government programs is a criminal activity.
Many remarks like that could be construed as exaggerations for rhetorical effect. Other falsehoods emanating from the administration have appeared to be misstatements of facts, perhaps unintentional. Still others arguably fall into the category of disinformation as intentional attempts to mislead Americans.
The surge in all these false or misleading claims in today’s political discourse is also a consequence of tectonic shifts in the media.
Americans have increasingly drifted from traditional news organizations and landed instead on a digital cacophony of podcasts, livestreams and social media feeds where partisanship, fury and resentment generally prevail over a balanced deliberation of facts. The political left has its favorites, but this new media ecosystem is today dominated by the right.
In a lecture last month, Kate Starbird, a scholar of disinformation at the University of Washington, described it as a “machinery of bullshit,” one built over time by design.
She said it “has become intertwined with digital media, has been effectively leveraged by right-wing populist movements and is now sinking into the political infrastructure of this country and others.”
Mr. Trump’s second term has already elevated a new generation of online influencers to prominence, many of whom echo his politics back and forth in posts, news articles, interviews or commentary. He has even brought them into the small White House press pool, which has traditionally operated as a professional, independent chronicler of the president’s every movement and utterance.
One of them was Brian Glenn, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice, a right-wing streaming and cable channel founded in 2020 that has spread misinformation and conspiracy theories. It was Mr. Glenn who hectored Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for not wearing a suit during his Oval Office meeting with Mr. Trump last month, giving voice to grumblings from White House aides.
“A lot of Americans,” he claimed, about Mr. Zelensky, “have problems with you not respecting the office.”
For Mr. Trump’s supporters, the current moment has become a war over the truth that, for now, they are winning.
“We are waging a 21st-century information warfare campaign against the left,” Jesse Watters, the Fox News personality, said last month.
“It’s like grass-roots guerrilla warfare,” he added. “Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it. By the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.”
On the day Ms. Leavitt floated the false claim about buying condoms for the Hamas fighters who control Gaza, accounts online added explosive but misleading or fabricated details even as the briefing was still underway, and long before mainstream organizations could verify the facts.
Avowedly right-wing websites and television programs piled on, claiming it was an example of fraud at the United States Agency for International Development, which Mr. Musk had already declared “a criminal agency.”
An article by Front Page Magazine, a conservative website, called the supposed aid “terror condoms,” fusing the claim to government and media reports from 2018 that Hamas fighters were floating improvised explosive devices into Israel using inflated condoms and other balloons.
The barrage of coverage found an audience. On X, Mr. Musk’s platform, posts mentioning the claim in any way were seen more than 111 million times in the first 24 hours, according to data from Tweet Binder by Audiense, a company that monitors content there. Mentions of “condom” and “Gaza” appeared on podcasts, radio shows or television programs with a combined national audience of 53 million, according to data from Critical Mention, a media monitoring company.
Numerous news organizations, including The New York Times, found the claim to be baseless, but those fact checks did not reach nearly as wide an audience.
U.S.A.I.D. spent just under $61 million on contraceptives worldwide in the 2023 fiscal year, the vast majority in Africa and none in Gaza, according to an annual report that has since been removed from the agency’s website. A separate $68 million grant last year provided emergency medical care in Gaza through International Medical Corps, which said it never provided condoms or any other family planning services.
Mr. Trump doubled down anyway. He declared that the United States had spent not $50 million but $100 million on condoms for Hamas fighters, and repeated the claim that they were used “as a method of making bombs.” And he did so as recently as Feb. 19, long after it was proved untrue.
The White House did not respond to questions about the false claims, but that and other falsehoods about spending by U.S.A.I.D. paved the way for a sweeping cut to the agency’s budget. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on March 10 that he would cancel 5,200 contracts — 83 percent of the agency’s total.
In some cases, officials have tried to deflect questions about the false statements. A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services pointed to an opinion piece that Mr. Kennedy wrote for Fox News, in which he wrote that vaccines could protect people from measles, while also arguing that “good nutrition” remains “a best defense against most chronic and infectious illnesses.”
And the Department of Agriculture said in a statement that though the contract Ms. Rollins had canceled was in fact for a study of natural fibers “on a surface level,” there was an “educational component” that referred to transgender men. The grant proposal used the word “transgender” once in a summary identifying the populations that might benefit from the research on natural fibers.
Other moves by Mr. Trump have reflected animus to efforts to track and identify misinformation and malign foreign influence in the name of free speech. He has moved to dismantle the government agencies responsible, including one created during his first term at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
He has done so when many of the industry guardrails against the spread of disinformation have already unraveled under political and legal pressure from the right.
Days before Mr. Trump returned to the White House, Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, announced that the company would end its third-party fact-checking program on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, embracing Republican claims that flagging lies was too often politically motivated. The company intends to shift to using Community Notes, a crowdsourced fact-checking effort used by Mr. Musk at X, the platform he bought in 2022.
Mr. Trump’s supporters sometimes depict his false or exaggerated statements as negotiating strategies. Mr. Trump himself has described prevarication as a means to an end. “If you say it enough and keep saying it,” he said once at a rally in 2021, “they’ll start to believe you.”
The consequences, though, can be corrosive — to his own policy goals and to trust more broadly. He has blamed Ukraine, for example, for the full-blown war that Russia started when its forces invaded in February 2022 and called Mr. Zelensky a dictator for suspending elections while the country is under martial law.
“It’s awfully hard to have a rational conversation about Ukraine policy if one can’t acknowledge the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine,” said James P. Rubin, who led the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which monitored foreign disinformation and propaganda until it lost its funding in December.
Mr. Rubio, who once called President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “a gangster and thug” and is now leading efforts to jump-start talks for a cease-fire, declined to dispute the president’s false claims when pressed.
Mr. Trump’s falsehoods have also infuriated close allies, including much of Europe, and provoked ridicule globally.
Laura Thornton, senior director for global democracy programs at the McCain Institute, a nonpartisan advocacy group named after the former Republican senator John S. McCain, said that in the case of Ukraine, Mr. Trump was rewriting history to justify his desire for closer ties with Mr. Putin.
“So now where we had a real consensus over the facts of what happened, we’ve seen a new narrative emerge,” she said, “which is basically, unfortunately, very aligned with the Kremlin narrative.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/business/trump-misinformation-false-claims.html
