President Donald Trump is no stranger to taking on the so-called fake news directly on social media. But senior officials in his second administration are increasingly adopting their boss’s robust real-time fact-checking tactics.
When Politico reported last week that the White House was considering lifting sanctions on Russian energy assets as part of its talks to end the war in Ukraine, top Trump administration officials sprang into action on X.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio demanded the outlet retract the “piece of fiction” less than two hours after its publication. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, posted later that evening that there was “not even a kernel of truth to this story” and called the report “fake crap.”
The episode underscored the aggressive social media strategy that Trump administration officials have used to respond to stories directly and in real time. Circumventing a process that typically plays out privately between press aides and reporters, senior officials, including Cabinet secretaries, have publicly fact-checked stories, issued scathing denials of news reports, and sparred with individual journalists.
Even Vice President JD Vance has participated in the pushback.
Earlier this month, Vance called out a Politico legal affairs reporter by name and accused him of being “unable or unwilling to look at the facts” in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal migrant and suspected MS-13 gang member who the Trump administration deported to El Salvador in March due to an administrative error.
“It is telling that the entire American media is going to run a propaganda operation today making you think an innocent ‘father of 3’ was apprehended by a gulag,” Vance said before fact-checking Cheney’s earlier posts about the case.
During his first term, Trump frequently singled out individual reporters and cable news personalities on Twitter for praise or criticism, depending on the story at hand. Trump’s tweets occasionally contained vicious personal attacks, such as one in 2017 claiming to have seen MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski “bleeding badly from a face-lift” at Mar-a-Lago.
The concept of pushing back against unfriendly journalists on social media has spread throughout Trump’s second administration.
“The best thing is to check them on X, because as you know, X is where journalists go not only to write stories, but also to pitch stories,” GOP strategist Ford O’Connell told the Washington Examiner. “It’s just the hub of where journalists go 24 hours a day. So it’s smart to be on there fact-checking them.”
Another senior Trump official who has had to combat a slew of negative headlines is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
“Totally fake story,” Hegseth posted to X last week in response to a CBS report that he had ordered the construction of a make-up studio for himself inside the Pentagon. “No ‘orders’ and no ‘makeup’ — but whatever.”
PENTAGON FIXATES ON ‘TOTALLY FAKE’ MAKEUP ROOM REPORT AMID DEPARTMENT TURMOIL
Hegseth’s denial was subsequently built upon by members of his communications team, with rebuttal to the makeup story posted multiple times over 24 hours. In an interview with Megyn Kelly, Colin Carroll, an ousted adviser of Hegseth’s, described the secretary’s fixation on “weird details” that would agitate him.
“It’s like a tale of two Petes,” Carroll said.
Stephen Miller, deputy White House chief of staff, has emerged as perhaps the most forceful defender of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, appearing frequently on cable news for fiery exchanges about deportations and related lawsuits.
But he has also used X to argue against reports he calls misleading.
“The media disinformation campaign continues at warp speed,” Miller wrote last week in response to an ABC News story about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s arrest of foreign student Mahmoud Khalil.
Miller disputed the implication of an ABC News headline that noted ICE did not have a warrant when its agents arrested Khalil, whose case has animated activists on the Left. He said arrest warrants are necessary for criminal arrests, but not in deportation proceedings.
Trump’s White House press aides are also notably active on X in service of Trump’s agenda.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and principal deputy communications director Alex Pfeiffer, among others, dispute specific storylines from their official accounts, expanding the reach of the press shop beyond the briefing podium.
Leavitt, for example, slammed NPR last week for a “FAKE NEWS” report that said Trump is considering replacing Hegseth as defense secretary. She said NPR’s anonymous source for the story “clearly has no idea what they are talking about.”
Pfeiffer on Friday told liberal writer Molly Jong-Fast that she has “the memory of a goldfish” in response to a since-deleted tweet that appeared to be about the case of Hannah Dugan, a Wisconsin judge who the FBI arrested last week for allegedly helping an illegal immigrant evade ICE officers. Democrats have fiercely objected to Dugan’s arrest and accused the Trump administration of shattering norms by targeting a judge.
Pfeiffer shared a screenshot of a news story from 2019 about a similar case involving the arrest of a judge who helped shield an illegal immigrant from ICE; that case did not generate the same level of outrage on the Left at the time.
