What is truth?
The Merriam Webster dictionary tell us:
a(1)
: the body of real things, events, and facts : actuality
(2)
: the state of being the case : fact
What’s a lie?
Merriam Webster again:
1
: to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive
She was lying when she said she didn’t break the vase.
He lied about his past experience.
2
: to create a false or misleading impression
Statistics sometimes lie.
Trump Repeats Lie That U.S. Spent $50 Million on Condoms for Gaza
Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer went down in history for kicking off President Donald Trump‘s first term with lies about the size of the crowd that attended the 2017 inauguration. At her first official briefing to kick off Trump’s second term, current White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went a different route, falsely claiming that the administration had blocked tens of millions in foreign aid earmarked for buying condoms to send to Gaza.
In fact, no such expenditure was in process as Trump assumed the office of the presidency. But the president has stuck to this claim, repeating it even after the White House conceded that it was inaccurate.
On Tuesday, while discussing how the U.S. was halting funds for international agencies and aid to other countries, Leavitt told the press that Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) found that $50 million was about to go “out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” She called it a “preposterous waste of taxpayer money” and justification for the OMB’s federal funding freeze, which has sparked backlash and widespread confusion. Musk himself shared a clip of Leavitt’s comment on X (formerly Twitter), writing, “Tip of iceberg,” while the figure got airtime on Fox News courtesy of host Jesse Watters and was repeated throughout the right-wing media ecosystem.
Yet the latest spending report from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) indicated that none of the $60.8 million worth of contraceptive and condom shipments it funded in the year prior went to Gaza, and it sent no condoms to the Middle East whatsoever. The vast majority of the condoms the agency buys are for health programs in Africa. Meanwhile, reports of the militant group Hamas using inflated condoms to float improvised incendiary devices into Israel — cited by Watters and others in connection to the supposed $50 million contraception package — are from 2018, not the recent Israel-Gaza conflict.
An administration official later walked back the $50 million claim in comments to The Independent, explaining that Leavitt had alluded two different $50 million “buckets” of foreign aid for medical services in war-torn Gaza, with that combined $100 million in grants covering some contraceptives along with many other healthcare supplies
Even aid workers have been perplexed at how the Trump administration arrivd at their exaggerated number — a sum that could buy 1.5 billion condoms for Gaza’s population of about 2.1 million. Steve Fake, a representative for American Near East Refugee Aid, which has partnered with USAID on a five-year, $50 million medical initiative called the Gaza Health Recovery Activity, tells Rolling Stone that contraception isn’t part of the support they’ll be providing. “Definitely no purchase of condoms in our program, and there are no components for family planning in the GHRA,” he says. As for where Leavitt might have picked up her talking point, he adds, “We have asked around, and no one is sure what this is referring to.
On Wednesday, despite the White House trying to gloss over the bogus story, Trump continued to run with it. “We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas,” he falsely claimed during a presser before he was to sign the Laken Riley Act into law. “And you know what’s happened to them? They’ve used them as a method of making bombs,” he said, apparently citing the old reports of inflated condom IEDs.
It just goes to show that when you’re Trump’s press secretary, the truth isn’t nearly as important as delivering a memorable line.
From the Guardian
‘We’re watching mass delusion happen’: Trump’s return to White House brings cascade of lies
In first week in office, president has made false claims on topics from immigration and economy to Panama canal.
Donald Trump had been US president again for less than 15 minutes when he made his first factually dubious claim.
“The vicious, violent and unfair weaponisation of the justice department and our government will end,” he said early in his inaugural address. There is no evidence that former president Joe Biden ordered the justice department to prosecute Trump and no violence took place.
The return of Trump to the White House for his second presidential term is also the return of what one critic called “America’s liar-in-chief”. His first week in office brought a cascade of false and misleading claims about immigration, the economy, electric vehicles, the Panama Canal, his election defeat in 2020 and the January 6 insurrection that followed.
Some see the brazen embrace of mendacity as both habitual and strategic.
“It’s a continuation of Donald Trump’s brand,” said Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill. “He knows that sunlight is the best disinfectant so he’s going to continue to lie to mask what he’s doing. If you can undermine institutions and credible sources of information, you can get away with lying and deceiving people. We’re watching that mass delusion happen right before our eyes in the Trump administration 2.0.”
During his first term as president, Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims over four years, according to a count by the Washington Post. He maintained a similar pace during last year’s presidential election campaign. On Monday, as he was sworn in for a second time at the US Capitol in Washington, he made clear it will be business as usual.
Trump said in his inaugural address the US government “fails to protect our magnificent, law-abiding American citizens but provides sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions that have illegally entered our country from all over the world”. In truth there is no evidence other countries are sending their criminals or the mentally ill across the border.
The 47th president also promised to direct his cabinet to defeat “record inflation” and rapidly bring down costs and prices. Inflation peaked at 9.1% under Biden in June 2022 but has been much higher in other historical periods, such as a more than 14% rate in 1980.
In discussing his desire for the US to take back the Panama Canal, Trump said: “American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape or form, and that includes the United States navy. And, above all, China is operating the Panama Canal.” Officials in Panama have denied Trump’s claims that China is operating the canal and that the US is being overcharged.
Shortly after the inauguration ceremony, the onslaught against reality continued. In remarks to an overflow audience at the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall, Trump claimed: “2020, by the way, that election was totally rigged.” Authorities who reviewed the election – including Trump’s own attorney general – concluded the election was fair.
Trump alleged that then House speaker Nancy Pelosi “turned down the offer of 10,000 soldiers” on 6 January 2021, when a violent mob stormed the US Capitol. Yet he issued no such order or formal request for National Guard troops before or during the rioting.
The president asserted that Biden had pardoned “what is it, 33 murderers, absolute murderers, the worst murderers. You know, when you get the death sentence in the United States, you have to be bad.” Biden announced last month that he was commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row; a commutation is not a pardon and does not exonerate the person.
Trump continued to fire off misleading assertions, wild exaggerations and blatant lies all week in a series of freewheeling exchanges with reporters. In a Fox News interview in the Oval Office he sought to explain his blanket pardon of January 6 rioters by dismissing violent attacks on police as “very minor incidents”.
Trump also used the interview to repeat a false claim that California governor Gavin Newsom and other officials refused to provide water from the northern part of the state to fight fires. He falsely claimed that Newsom prioritised the preservation of endangered fish over public safety.
Even the White House website has been compromised. Among the claims on Trump’s official biography are that he won “a landslide victory” last year and he “defines the American success story”. But the site leaves out what might be Trump’s “big lie” that he won the 2020 presidential election, stating he “won a second time despite several assassination attempts and the unprecedented weaponization of law fare against him”.
But while fact-checkers continued to hold Trump to account, Republicans seemed less willing than ever to correct the record while rightwing influencers were eager to amplify his falsehoods in what is now a fragmented media ecosystem. The leaders of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and X attended his inauguration; Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the platform will abandon third party fact-checking.
Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and media relations consultant, said: “If there’s any lasting impact from Donald Trump’s time on the political stage it’s that we live in a world now where you can just make up your own facts and truth is how ever you decide to to bend it.
“There are content creators and content machines that exist solely for the purpose of laundering anything that Donald Trump says and making it true to a certain degree. It’s a play off the [Richard] Nixon quote: if the president does it, it is legal; well, if the president says it, it’s true. That’s the world that we live in now.”
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