During his first briefing as a White House press secretary, Caroline Leavitt said he was “committed to telling the truth from this podium every day.” A while later, she announced that the new administration had blocked a $50 million contract for Gaza condoms.
“That's an idiotic waste of taxpayer money,” she said.
It was also an unlikely, ridiculous claim on its face, and was quickly exposed. Federal grants have been awarded to millions of people to prevent sexually transmitted diseases in Gaza, but not in the Palestinian territory, but in the provinces of Mozambique.
The condom claims went viral anyway, and permeated the political discourse that President Trump used to justify his drastic push to slash the federal government.
Trump's first four years at the White House were filled with false or misleading statements. Of these, 30,573, or one tally, per day, 21st. But at the time, aides often sought to reduce or contain the terrible false damage.
This time, Trump is joined by his cabinet officials and advisory compatriots who have even amplified them and even spread themselves. Together, they effectively institutionalize disinformation.
It is still early in his term, and while many of his executive orders face legal challenges that could blunt the false influences that drive them, Trump and his advisors have led the country into a new era of post-truth politics, where facts are contested and the fiction used to pursue policy goals is contested.
Trump justified the pardon of hundreds of rioters convicted of violence, including assaulting police officers, at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and by claiming that “they didn't assault any of them,” he attacked NATO ally Canada, claiming that fentanyl was poured across the border, but in reality, less than 1% of drugs were traced to the country last year.
Trump's farming secretary, Brooke Rollins, boasted that he had cancelled a $600,000 contract to study the menstrual cycles of transgender men in X.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who now runs the Department of Health and Human Services, claims that the measles vaccine kills people every year, but scientists say it's wrong.
Audrey McCabe, analyst for Common Cause, a watchdog for nonpartisan governments, said the administration pursued a strategy of “disinformation overload” that has overwhelmingly outweighed the enemy as well as the judicial system.
“How do you push this back when you come from someone who has been elected president and someone who has decided to be close to him?” she said.
The false narrative that once permeated the dark corners of the internet is advanced by Trump and his appointees and amplified by media echo chambers, littering political discourse and exacerbating the erosion of broader trust in the institution itself.
Elon Musk, a technology executive who leads the crusade against federal spending, has repeatedly spread disinformation, including allegations about Gaza's condoms. He admits the mistake, but presses that it has not been deleted.
He recently called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” implying that one of the most popular government programs is criminal activity.
Many such statements can be interpreted as exaggeration of rhetorical effects. Other falsehoods emanating from the administration appeared to be a false attitude of fact that was perhaps not intentional. Still others are undoubtedly fallen into the disinformation category as a deliberate attempt to mislead Americans.
The surge in all these false or misleading claims in today's political discourse is also the result of structural changes in the media.
Americans have been increasingly drifting away from traditional news organizations, landing instead on the digital dissonance of podcasts, live streams and social media feeds. The political left has favourites, but this new media ecosystem is now dominated to the right.
In a lecture last month, University of Washington disinformation scientist Kate Starbird described it as a “bulldy machine.”
She said, “It's intertwined with digital media, effectively used by the right-wing populist movement, and is now sinking into the political infrastructure of this country and others.”
Trump's second term has already raised a new generation of online influencers to prominence, many of whom have reflected his politics over and over again in posts, news articles, interviews, or commentary. He also brought them to the small White House press pool. It has traditionally acted as a professional and independent chronicle of all the president's movements and statements.
One of them was Brian Glenn, a correspondent for the authentic American Voice, a right-wing streaming and cable channel founded in 2020 that spread misinformation and conspiracy theories. It was Glenn who adopted Ukrainian president Voldy Mee Zelensky because he was not wearing a suit during an oval office meeting with Trump last month.
“A lot of Americans,” he argued of Zelensky that “the problem is that you don't respect the office.”
For Trump supporters, the present moment is now a war over the truth that they are winning.
“We're running a 21st century information war campaign against the left,” said Jesse Watters, a personality at Fox News, last month.
“It's like a grassroots guerrilla warfare,” he added. “Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, Logan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it, and by the time it reaches everyone, millions of people have seen it.”
That day, Leavitt raised the false claims that he would buy condoms for Hamas fighters that control Gaza.
Right-wing websites and television shows have been stacked, claiming that it is an example of fraud at the US International Development Agency.
Articles from Front Page Magazine, a conservative website called the supposed aid “terrorism condom,” fused government and media reports that Hamas fighters were floating in Israel on improvised explosive devices using inflated condoms and other balloons.
The barrage of press found an audience. Musk's platform X saw more than 111 million posts mentioning billing in the first 24 hours, according to data from Audiense's Tweet Binder, which monitors content. According to data from media surveillance company Crital Merestion, references to “condoms” and “Gaza” appeared on podcasts, radio or television shows with 53 million national audiences.
Many news organizations, including The New York Times, found the claims unfounded, but those fact-checks did not reach viewers as broadly.
USAID spent 2023 on contraceptives worldwide on contraceptives worldwide, according to an annual report removed from the Asgence website. Last year, another $68 million grant provided emergency medical care in Gaza through the International Medical Corps.
Anyway, Trump has doubled. He declared that the US spent $100 million instead of $50 million on Hamas fighter condoms, and repeated the claim that it was used “as a way to make bombs.” And he did that just like on February 19th, after it was proven untrue.
The White House did not answer questions about false claims, but other falsehoods about USAID spending paved the way for cuts that outweighed the agency's budget. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on March 10 that he would cancel his 5,200 contract. This is 83% of the institution's total.
In some cases, staff members attempt to deflect questions about false statements. A Health and Human Services spokesperson pointed to the part of the opinion Kennedy wrote for Fox News, writing that vaccines can protect people from measles, but argued that “good nutrition” remains “the best defense against most chronic diseases and infectious diseases.”
And in a statement, the Department of Agriculture said that while Mr Contract cancelled, there is actually a “educational element” that refers to trans men for the study of natural fibers “at the surface level.” The grant proposal once used the term “transgender” in an abstract identifying populations that could benefit from natural fiber research.
Other moves by Trump reflect animus, tracking misinformation in the name of free speech, identifying and identifying worsening foreign influences. He moved to dismantle responsible government agencies, including those who were created during his first term at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
He did so when many of the industry's guardrails against the spread of disinformation have already been unraveled under political and legal pressure from rights.
A few days before Trump returns to the White House, Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company is closing its third-party fact-checking program on Facebook, Instagram and threads, accepting Republicans' claims that the lie flags are far too often politically motivated. The company plans to move to using community notes, a crowdsourcing fact-checking effort Musk used on X, the platform he purchased in 2022.
Trump's supporters may portray his false or exaggerated statements as negotiation strategies. Trump himself has described dosing as a way to end the process. “If you say it enough and keep saying it,” he said once at a 2021 rally, “They start to believe in you.”
However, the outcome could be corrosive because of his own policy goals and more broadly trust. He, for example, denounced Ukraine for the full-scale war that Russia began when Russia invaded its military in February 2022, calling Zelensky the dictator for the state to suspend elections under martial law.
“If we can't acknowledge the fact that Russia has invaded Ukraine, it's very difficult to have a reasonable conversation about Ukrainian policies,” said James P. Rubin, who headed the State Department's Global Engagement Centre, which monitored foreign disinformation and propaganda until it lost funds in December.
Rubio, who once called Russian President Vladimir V. Putin a “gang and thug,” is now leading efforts to launch talks for a ceasefire, and refused to challenge the president's false claims when pressed.
Trump's falsehoods have infuriated close allies, including many in Europe, and have led to ridiculous worldwide.
Laura Thornton, senior director of the McCain Institute's Global Democracy Program, is a nonpartisan advocacy group named after former Republican Sen. John S. McCain, who said in the case of Ukraine, Trump rewritten history to justify his close ties with Putin.
“So now we had a real consensus on the facts of what happened, and we saw a new story coming out,” she said.
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