At the beginning of her first press conference on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt proclaimed that she is committed to "telling the truth from this podium every single day." Based on the record of people who held that position during Trump's first term, it probably shouldn't surprise us that she went on to lie.
Several fact-checkers have taken on the one Levitt told about why the administration put a freeze on all foreign aid. She claimed 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." Not true!
[T]he 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.
Even after an administration official walked back Levitt's claim, Trump repeated it Wednesday night, adding the nonsense Jesse Watters threw into the mix about how Hamas was using the condoms to make bombs.
What really happened is that, on the day Trump was inaugurated, he issued an executive order freezing all foreign assistance. The backlash was so severe that a week later, Sec. of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver exempting $60 billion in foreign aid from the freeze.
In other words, the administration had egg on its face and, instead of owning up to their mistake, decided to lie, distract, and blame the Biden administration.
Levitt also cleared up a lie that will be used a lot in this administration's plans for mass deportation. When Trump, Vance, or Homan talk about prioritizing the deportation of "criminals," they really mean all undocumented immigrants.
According to Karoline Leavitt, egg prices are soaring because Biden killed all the chickens.
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) January 28, 2025 at 1:03 PM
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She actually said that "the Biden administration and the Department of Agriculture directed the mass killing of more than one hundred million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore a lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage."
It's almost as if she wants us to believe that Biden or someone in the Department of Agriculture is a serial chicken murderer rather than the fact that bird flu is fast approaching a national emergency - which is why so many producers are having to kill whole flocks of their chickens.
Here's the dilemma Leavitt is facing: if she admits that egg prices are being impacted by the bird flu, she negates all of Trump's campaign rhetoric about blaming the price of eggs on Biden. Can't have that because Dear Leader is always right. So instead, she comes up with this ridiculous claim about Biden directing the mass killing of chickens. Lie, distract, and blame.
I'm sure that, now that Trump has laid the blame for Wednesday's airplane crash on the DEI policies of the Biden administration (before the investigation even gets underway), Leavitt will join Vance, Hegseth, and Duffy in backing up that lie next time she steps up to the podium.
Of course, none of this is new to any of us. During his first administration Trump told over 30,000 lies. But the one time you can count on a lie from this president and his enablers, is when he fails. Here's what I wrote about that at the beginning of his first term:
That is a good reminder that this president lies to get what he wants. He has done so constantly from day one. What happens is that when he lies, there is a firestorm of a reaction where we all focus on the lie until the media gets bored with it and we move on – or until Trump tells another whopper and the cycle starts all over again. Unless we connect the dots, the lies become episodic rather than indicative of a pattern...
What I’m describing here is the way in which Donald Trump exhibits behaviors associated with a severe personality disorder. He fabricates a world in which he is both dominant and successful. When challenged, he diverts with outrageous lies designed to blame a villain and distract us from his failures. He then assumes we’ll all move on to the next fabrication of his dominance and success.
The one thing we can be certain of is that nowhere in that pattern is there a place for reflection on reality or a feedback loop for self-correction.
In other words, it's deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say.
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