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 arrived 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.
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