President Trump’s first four years in the White House were filled with falsehoods. Now he and those around him are using false claims to justify their policy changes.
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 US$50 million ($87m) 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 Donald Trump has used to justify his sweeping push to slash the federal Government.
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, Trump is joined by a coterie of Cabinet officials and advisers who have amplified them and even spread their own. Together, they are effectively institutionalising 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, 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.
Trump justified the pardons of hundreds of rioters convicted of the violence, including assaults on police officers, at the Capitol on January 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% of the drug was traced to the country last year.
Brooke Rollins, Trump’s Agriculture Secretary, boasted on the social site X that she had cancelled a US$600,000 ($1m) contract to study the menstrual cycles of transgender men, when in fact the grant financed a study on using natural fibres like cotton, wool and hemp in feminine hygiene products.
Robert F. Kennedy jnr, the vaccine sceptic 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 non-partisan 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 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 programmes 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 organisations 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 favourites, 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”.
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 Glenn who hectored Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for not wearing a suit during his Oval Office meeting with Trump last month, giving voice to grumblings from White House aides.
“A lot of Americans,” he claimed, about Zelenskyy, “have problems with you not respecting the office”.
For 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 grassroots 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 Leavitt floated the false claim about buying condoms for the Hamas fighters who control the Gaza Strip, accounts online added explosive but misleading or fabricated details even as the briefing was still under way, and long before mainstream organisations could verify the facts.
Avowedly right-wing websites and television programmes piled on, claiming it was an example of fraud at the US Agency for International Development, which 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, 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 programmes with a combined national audience of 53 million, according to data from Critical Mention, a media monitoring company.
Numerous news organisations, including The New York Times, found the claim to be baseless, but those fact checks did not reach nearly as wide an audience.
USAID spent just under US$61m ($106m) 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 US$68m ($119m) 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.
Trump doubled down anyway. He declared that the United States had spent not US$50m ($87m) but US$100m ($174.5m) 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 February 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 USAID 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 5200 contracts – 83% of the agency’s total.
In some cases, officials have tried to deflect questions about the false statements. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services pointed to an opinion piece that 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 defence against most chronic and infectious illnesses”.
And the Department of Agriculture said in a statement that though the contract Rollins had cancelled was in fact for a study of natural fibres “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 fibres.
Other moves by 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 unravelled under political and legal pressure from the right.
Days before Trump returned to the White House, Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, announced that the company would end its third-party fact-checking programme 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 Musk at X, the platform he bought in 2022.
Trump’s supporters sometimes depict his false or exaggerated statements as negotiating strategies. 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 Zelenskyy 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 Centre, which monitored foreign disinformation and propaganda until it lost its funding in December.
Rubio, who once called President Vladimir Putin of Russia “a gangster and thug” and is now leading efforts to jump-start talks for a ceasefire, declined to dispute the President’s false claims when pressed.
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 non-partisan advocacy group named after the former Republican Senator John McCain, said that in the case of Ukraine, Trump was rewriting history to justify his desire for closer ties with 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.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson
Photographs by: Doug Chayka, Haiyun Jiang, Pete Marovich, Doug Mills, Lynsey Addario and Joao Silva
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