“Scandal” Yet of the New Trump Era The rage about this is absurdly misplaced. By Jim Newell

 

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On Tuesday morning, the D.C.–area news publication Politico missed payroll. The publication chalked it up to “technical error,” and employees were paid later.

But in certain corners of the Elon Musk–owned social media platform X, this administrative matter required further investigation, and the investigators worked backward from the assumption of corruption. The work of these sleuths led them to a government database tracking spending that showed that Politico LLC had received a total of $8.2 million from the government in recent years and was being—in one MAGA influencer’s mind—“massively funded by USAID.” Hence, the thinking went, the company missed payroll because USAID had been guttedBy Wednesday afternoon, White House press secretary

Karoline Leavitt announced during a briefing that she had been “made aware that USAID has funded media outlets like Politico. I can confirm that more than $8 million that has gone to subsidizing subscriptions will no longer be happening.” And early Thursday morning, President Donald Trump wrote a post, almost entirely in capital letters: “THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY!”