Fact check: $50 million for condoms in Gaza? Five big reasons to be skeptical Trump’s story is true | CNN Politics
Updated 3:00 PM EST, Wed January 29, 2025
During her first official White House briefing as President Donald Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt announced that Trump had prevented a “preposterous waste of taxpayer money.” Trump’s team, she said, used the president’s pause on foreign aid to thwart a plan in which “there was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.”
Leavitt’s Tuesday comments made headlines around the world. And the president himself told an even more dramatic version of the story in a speech on Wednesday, saying that “we identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”
But there are at least five big reasons to be skeptical that the story is true.
The White House offered no evidence for the story: Leavitt provided no proof for her claim that there was ever a federal plan to spend $50 million on condoms in Gaza. And when CNN asked Leavitt and her colleagues for any evidence, another White House official instead pointed us to comments from the State Department — comments that, as we’ll discuss below, did not even repeat Leavitt’s claim of a planned $50 million Gaza condom expenditure, let alone prove the claim.