Trump and Musk Are Pushing an Absurd Lie About Government and the Media

Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fox News, Republican lawmakers, and countless prominent right-wing commentators across social media are pushing a ridiculous lie about the Biden administration funding the media.

It started on Tuesday when staff at Politico reportedly didn’t receive their paychecks on time because of technical glitch. The right began speculating that the delay was related to Musk taking a blowtorch to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with many pointing out that the government had ferried $8.2 million to Politico over the past year. 

Musk — the world’s richest man, whose companies have substantially benefited from government contracts and subsidies — began amplifying the narrative on Wednesday, and it was off to the disinformation races, with conservatives using some truly hare-brained sleuthing to claim payments to Politico and other outlets prove the government and the media are working together nefariously to prop up Democrats and take down Trump.

The reality isn’t so scandalous. Politico is by no means a left-wing outlet, and it has often been criticized for being too deferential to conservative and corporate interests. It covers the machinations of Congress, more than anything, and it offers an extremely expensive “Politico Pro” service that many government offices use to track these machinations. 

The $8.2 million figure represents the total spent by the entire federal government; USAID paid Politico only $44,000 from 2023-2024. The Washington Post points out that earlier this week the Trump White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director signed a $35,000 contract for a Politico Pro. Plenty of congressional offices pay for the subscription, too, including the office of Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who posted yesterday that Musk was “exposing” Politico’s “grift.”

​​”Politico has never been a beneficiary of government programs or subsidies — not one cent, ever, in 18 years,” Politico CEO Goli Sheikholeslami and co-founder John Harris wrote in a memo on Wednesday. 

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The non-scandal made its way to the White House Briefing Room a few hours after Musk started pushing it. “I can confirm that the more than $8 million taxpayer dollars that have gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayer’s dime will no longer be happening,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. She said that Musk’s team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) “is working on canceling those payments now.”

Musk, meanwhile, continued to amplify posts pushing the idea that the payments are something more sinister than government offices wanting a resource that tracks legislative votes. “USAID funding corporate media is the biggest scandal of 2025,” wrote Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski in a post endorsed by Musk. “In essence, the Biden administration was paying the media through USAID to attack the likes of Rumble and X, advocate for censorship, and install their own government in the USA by attacking the opposition party.”

Musk-loving influencer Ian Miles Cheong, who lives in Malaysia, had the bright idea of looking into how much government money has been going to The New York Times. 

“The US Government gave the New York Times tens of millions of dollars over just the past 5 years despite paying relatively little money to the NYT in the years preceding 2021,” he wrote. The post now has a Community Note, though, as it appears Cheong just keyword searched “New York Times” and ignored that the results also included other “New York” recipients, such as New York University, which has received millions in federal grants.

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In a sign of how easily patently false conspiracy theories fueled by half-assed research can spread online, Andrew Huberman, a prominent health and wellness influencer with some quack-ish tendencies, expressed his own set of concerns in response to Cheong’s post, prefacing it with: “Assuming the below is accurate.”

It wasn’t accurate, of course, but ultimately that doesn’t matter. Musk and enough other powerful figures have been beating the drum hard enough to legitimize the lie among anyone who would like to believe it’s true, which includes Fox News and its millions of viewers. 

“We just found out the Biden administration was paying the press,” host Jesse Watters said on his primetime show Wednesday night. The lie will certainly be echoed by the network’s talking heads for days, weeks, months, and years to come.

Trump finally weighed in early Thursday morning, characteristically exaggerating the already absurd lie. “LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A ‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS,” he wrote on Truth Social. “THE LEFT WING ‘RAG,’ KNOWN AS ‘POLITICO,’ SEEMS TO HAVE RECEIVED $8,000,000. Did the New York Times receive money??? Who else did??? THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY! THE DEMOCRATS CAN’T HIDE FROM THIS ONE. TOO BIG, TOO DIRTY!”

Musk reposted the rant on his X account.