Former president Donald Trump talks about the assassination attempt on him as he speaks to an audience during a town hall meeting at Dort Financial Center in Flint, Michigan on Tuesday, September 17, 2024.
President Donald Trump has bizarrely lied that the U.S. was sending $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza that the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas then used to make bombs.
Despite neither claim being true, his lies were repeated by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who called the spending “a preposterous waste of taxpayer money,” and Fox News host Jesse Watters who claimed the condoms were used to explosives-laden balloon bombs that floated into Israel.
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The lie seems aimed to generate support for the Trump administration’s recently botched freeze of all federally-funded grants and loans, which caused widespread confusion as it shut down vital life-saving programs both domestically and internationally. The freeze, which has since been halted by a federal judge, sought to drastically reduce wasteful government spending and end programs that don’t fit the administration’s ideological agenda.
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Trump: We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas. And you know what’s happened to them? They’ve used them as a method of making bombs.
When CNN asked the White House for evidence to back up the claim, Trump administration officials provided no response. The network found that in three previous years under former President Joe Biden, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spent no money on condoms in the entire Middle East. Furthermore, the United States’ total worldwide spending on condoms is only about $8.2 million, that most of that went toward African countries.
Despite this, on Tuesday, right-wing anti-woke lesbian former Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce, who now serves as a State Department spokesperson, claimed that her department prevented $102 million in “unjustified funding” to a contractor in Gaza which included money for contraception. Bruce, when she was at Fox News, warned her audience about human-animal chimera that were “obviously from Hell” that she accused Democrats of creating.
This money was meant to go towards the International Medical Corps (IMC), the Associated Press (AP) reported. However, the IMC told the AP, “No U.S. government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms, nor provide family-planning services.”
Example 1: Condoms. Prevented $102 million in unjustified funding to a contractor in Gaza, including money for contraception. 2/11
One former senior Biden official who worked on Gaza aid issues called the claim “imaginary” and bluntly added, “It’s a lie, they are making s*** up.”
Jeremy Konyndyk, a USAID official during the Biden and Obama administrations, said, “This is total garbage. Either fully invented, or someone who doesn’t know how to read a spreadsheet.”
So look – on the “Gaza condoms” thing.
USAID procures condoms for around $0.05 apiece.
$50m would be ONE BILLION condoms.
What’s going is here is NOT a billion condoms for Gaza.
What’s going on is that the bros at DOGE apparently can’t read govt spreadsheets.
— Jeremy Konyndyk is at jeremykonyndyk.bsky.social (@JeremyKonyndyk) January 29, 2025
Trump made at least 30,573 false or misleading statements during his first presidential term, The Washington Post reported. He has also long conflated Hamas militants with Palestinian civilians as a way to justify violence against Palestinians in a bid to “clean out” Gaza and use the beachfront property; a proposal supported by Israel’s right-wing government.
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