Remember “alternative facts”? It’s been eight years since Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, uttered those words during a “Meet the Press” interview. The patently Orwellian phrase set off a firestorm of coverage: According to Conway, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer wasn’t lying when he said Trump had drawn “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration,” despite clear evidence to the contrary. Spicer’s facts weren’t false, Conway said, just “alternative.”
Two months before that interview, in November 2016, Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” the word of the year. Trump’s first presidential campaign and the global ascendancy of the far right had sparked a pervading interest in fake news, disinformation and the political utility of truth-telling in a world shaped by algorithmic forces. Pundits grappled with the realization that social media’s prime role in disseminating news now meant that quick reactions — the stronger the better — would take precedence over thoughtful engagement.
If Trump had a first term marked by “alternative facts,” his second has demonstrated an outright hostility to anything resembling truth at all: Yes, there are the classic Trump lies (like his ludicrous claim that diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI] programs are making planes fall out of the sky), but there’s also his administration’s brazen purge of health and climate data — an assault on foundational scientific knowledge that archivists have scrambled to preserve.
Trump has also ordered $4 billion in cuts to National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants used to fund critical research at universities, cancer centers and hospitals. A federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s order on Tuesday, but medical researchers have warned that, if implemented, the cuts could hamstring efforts to cure cancer and chronic health conditions, rendering scientific breakthroughs unobtainable.
And then Trump has made ridiculous statements like this: “We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas,” he told reporters last month during a signing ceremony for the Laken Riley Act.
The baseless claim, first promoted by Elon Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), seems in fact to be referencing an $83.5 million payment to support HIV prevention and treatment efforts in the East African country of Mozambique, whose Gaza province is unrelated to the Gaza Strip in the Middle East. The nongovernmental organization that received the funds, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, said none of the money was used to acquire condoms. This is a far cry from the eye-catching headlines about rash government spending on “explosive condoms” for Hamas. But even the use of government funds to purchase contraceptives is not particularly notable; the U.S. Agency for International Development has worked on global HIV prevention efforts for decades.
On Tuesday, Musk finally walked back the White House’s claim, telling reporters, “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect.” It’s a chilling acknowledgement — no more lip service will be paid to the pursuit of truth, just expect and accept a steady stream of falsities from those in power. While Musk tacked on a note that DOGE’s incorrect statements “should be corrected,” he knows it doesn’t matter. The $50 million condom claim already went viral across social media and conservative news networks; now that it’s lodged in the brains of countless Trump supporters, it’s unlikely that a belated press briefing will change anyone’s mind.
Plus, Musk then added, “I’m not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms to anywhere.” Again, we didn’t. And yet this flippant ignorance is also part of the new anti-truth paradigm, a weaponized, intentional “I’m just asking questions” attitude, crafted to obfuscate simple facts. Musk could, of course, choose to learn the details of global HIV prevention, why the U.S. does it, how public health efforts in Mozambique have a ripple effect on all of us. But why would he?
The same ideological current runs through Trump’s gutting of medical research. The slashed NIH funds for researchers’ overhead costs boastfully disregards even considering why those costs might be necessary. And the impact on public health could be devastating.
Take HIV prevention, for instance. U.S. health officials first became aware of AIDS in 1981, but it took four more years for then-President Ronald Reagan to speak about it publicly. By 1990, HIV was a leading cause of death for young people in the U.S.; more than 40 million people have died from HIV globally.
But today, for many in the U.S., the HIV/AIDS epidemic now feels like it’s in the rearview mirror. That’s thanks in large part to concerted efforts from activist groups like the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), which fought to expand the approval and availability of life-saving drugs. New HIV infections have declined since 1984 by an estimated 76 percent. ACT UP’s efforts set the government’s public health agenda, pushing for vital change from agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and NIH. It is because of these efforts that we have federal funding for HIV prevention and treatment in the first place — the same funding now being cut or placed on pause.
But the epidemic is not over, certainly not globally, and also not in the U.S. “Especially here in New York City where the HIV epidemic really started, there’s been a lot of investment to get that last little bit to end the epidemic in recent years,” Jason Zucker, an adult and pediatric infectious disease physician at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, told me. “If we want to end the epidemic, it’s going to be really hard. You have to increase your efforts to increase testing and identify every person living with HIV, so you can try to spend additional time and effort linking them to care and getting them on treatment, because undetectable equals untransmittable.”
The second Trump presidency has made that battle all the more difficult. I spoke with Zucker before Trump announced the cuts to NIH funding, but after he had ordered a freeze on the disbursement of all federal funds. While that freeze was also temporarily halted by a federal judge, courts ruled Trump has been defying the judge’s order. And as part of Trump’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and “gender ideology,” his administration has continued to scour grants for any mention of words that could be loosely construed as relating to DEI — which in practice has spanned a range of topics, even flagging words like “diversity” and “women” for review. Zucker noted that Trump’s multipronged attacks “will really impact our ability to bring the epidemic to a close like had been planned.”
Public health, we know, is not a priority of the Trump administration. Five years ago, the Trump administration failed to respond to the emergence of COVID-19 in a timely or effective manner. The global pandemic sparked a new wave of vaccine denialism and a crumbling of trust in our government’s health agencies — trust that won’t be restored with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist, at the helm of the Health and Human Services Department. The CDC botched its public health guidance, first under Trump, and then continued to sow confusion under President Joe Biden’s administration, shifting the onus of responsibility for public health from the state to individuals.
Trump’s attacks on medical research, federal funding, and access to health and climate data are the logical outgrowth of the post-truth seeds first planted in 2016 and watered during the COVID-19 pandemic. And while the media focus has been on the consequences for scientific research, Zucker emphasized to me that the biggest impacts will be on treatment.
“The whole point of research is to give us better methods of caring for people,” Zucker said. “I say that as someone who’s primarily a researcher: My work doesn’t matter if I translate that into providing better care.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.