Trump Regime Media: WND's One-Source Wonder Strikes Again
WorldNetDaily writer Bob Unruh uncritically repeats Trump administration claims without bothering to fact-check -- and won't correct articles that have been proven to be false.
The first role of Trump Regime Media is to never question anything Donald Trump or his administration does, and WorldNetDaily has been on quite the tear in its slavish devotion to uncritically repeating sensational claims by the Trump administration that turn out to be, well, less than true. WND’s leader in that is Bob Unruh — no stranger to credulously promoting false claims — who served up servile stenography in a Feb. 10 article:
There’s more bad news for those working on all those leftover programs from Joe Biden to subsidize illegal aliens.
Now DOGE chief Elon Musk says he’s found out that FEMA spent $59 million last week to house illegals in luxury hotels in New York City, and he wants the money back.
In a social media statement, Musk, chief of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, said his team “just discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants. Sending this money violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order. That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals! A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”
Unruh wrote in an article the next day:
Four workers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency are being fired for unilaterally sending a massive $59 million payment for hotels in New York City to house illegal aliens.
The “egregious payment” came about after they decided to go about “circumventing leadership” on the issue of payments of federal monies to sanctuary cities.
Fox News reported the firings come after Elon Musk explained on social media, “The DOGE team just discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants.”
But that’s a lie, as PolitiFact reported:
FEMA did not give money directly to New York hotels; it did give money to New York City. That move was neither illegal nor secretive. It was part of a program that Congress created and funded using money from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, not FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, which is primarily used after natural disasters. The money did not fund luxury hotel rooms for immigrants.
[…]
Musk did not respond to PolitiFact’s request for evidence that FEMA sent New York City $59 million “last week.”
FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program website shows how much money state and local governments and nonprofit organizations have received from the program. However, the data is only updated through fiscal year 2024. In 2024, New York City’s Office of Management and Budget received $59 million.
The New York City’s mayor office told The Associated Press Feb. 10 that it received $81 million from the federal government the week of Feb. 3 in two payments — one for $59 million, $19 million of which went to direct hotel costs.
[…]
The U.S. General Services Administration sets the per diem rates for New York City hotel rooms at between $179 and $342 per night, depending on the month. Luxury, five-star hotels in New York City cost around $400 to $1,000 a night, according to a search on Expedia, a travel booking site.
As of this writing, Unruh’s article remains live and uncorrected. Still, Unruh wrote a Feb. 12 follow-up that is just as false:
Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has confirmed the return to the federal government of $59 million that workers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency has dispatched to New York City for the benefit of illegal aliens it is housing.
The decision to send the money violated President Donald Trump’s orders against fraud and misspending by the federal bureaucracy and four workers at FEMA were fired for their actions.
Fox News reports DHS has confirmed it has “taken back” the money.
“Secretary Noem has clawed back the full payment that FEMA deep state activists unilaterally gave to NYC migrant hotels,” a DHS official said.
Given that the money was never spent on “illegal aliens” at “luxury hotels,” it is not possible for that money to have been “clawed back.” But Unruh is paid to be part of Trump Regime Media, not to report the truth.
More false claims
Unruh mindless repeated more bogus claims of fraud in a Feb. 14 article:
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says that the $2.7 trillion in Medicare and Medicaid fraud that already has been uncovered by President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is just part of “a very long list of fraud, waste and abuse that DOGE is identifying on a daily basis.”
The question was raised during a recent White House briefing, when she was asked specifically about the $2.7 trillion revealed by a House subcommittee run by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.
She said:
The U.S. government sent $2.7 TRILLION in Medicare & Medicaid money overseas to people who were NOT eligible to receive it.
That’s 8% of our national debt.
Medicare isn’t going broke. The money is being stolen.
— DOGE NEWS- Department of Government Efficiency (@realdogeusa) February 13, 2025
“Elon Musk also talked about yesterday about Social Security payments that are going out the door for people who are no longer with us,” she continued, “I would say that is certainly fraud. There’s also a lot of contracts they’ve identified that, just as a hypothetical example, are a million bucks, but only $500,000 went out the door. So where’s the rest of that cash?”
But Unruh eventually got around to telling (some of) the truth:
It was a hearing Wednesday by the Department of Government Efficiency subcommittee in the House that confirmed since 2003, a “staggering” $2.7 trillion had been paid by taxpayers for “improper Medicare and Medicaid payments, including to individuals overseas who are not eligible to receive them.”
But DOGE did not make that finding, as Poynter detailed:
During the Biden administration, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan Congressional agency, published reports March 26, 2024, and June 27, 2024, estimating that, since fiscal year 2003, federal agencies had reported $2.7 trillion of what the GAO described as “improper” payments, defined as “those that should not have been made or were made in the incorrect amount.”
The $2.7 trillion included payments made by Medicare and Medicaid and other federal programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Auditors said the improper payments were made for many reasons, from “unintentional administrative errors to fraud.”
Both of these false claims remain live and uncorrected.
Unruh took another stab at parroting Musk’s bogus narratives in a Feb. 17 article:
Maybe there are vampires after all.
And they’re collecting Social Security.
That stunning conclusion comes from Elon Musk, chief of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, and is a result of DOGE’s initial review of the nation’s Social Security, its payouts, and more specifically, those getting the benefits.
Musk posted on social media the comment, “According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!”
He continued, “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”
The chart, for example, lists one person each in the age range 360-369 and 240-249.
That would make those beneficiaries older than the Civil War, older than the Revolutionary War, older than the Constitution, older than … the United States, which is coming up on its 250th next year.
Musk noted that, “This might be the biggest fraud in history.”
Again, no. The Concord Coalition explains:
Elon Musk made headlines this week when he revealed the Social Security Administration (SSA) failed to record the deaths of millions of people over the age of 100 and suggested vampires might be real and a lot of them were collecting Social Security. He also noted there were more “eligible” Social Security Numbers (SSNs) than U.S. citizens, suggesting “this might be the biggest fraud in history.” Sadly, Musk’s comments reveal how little he knows about Social Security, rather than how much the program pays to dead people or non-citizens.
Since Social Security was enacted in 1935, there have been more than 530 million SSNs issued, that’s out of one billion possible combinations of nine-digit numbers. The number of SSNs for each age group that Musk revealed does not reflect the number of people collecting benefits, but rather the number of SSNs issued minus the number of deaths recorded by the SSA. Thus, these numbers are not indicative of scandalous activity, as Musk seems to believe.
As The Concord Coalition has previously written, most SSNs are issued when children are born in the United States. However, many immigrants are also eligible to receive SSNs for employment purposes. Some of these immigrants obtain U.S. citizenship, while others leave the country. As a result, the number of SSNs will always be greater than the number of U.S. citizens. That is especially true given the difficulty of obtaining comprehensive death records, both here and abroad.
The SSA maintains a computer database known as the Death Master File. However, this database was not established until 1983, and not every state has fully participated until recently. Thus, deaths that occurred prior to the 1980s were less likely to be included.
Unforunately, Unruh and WND care only about generating cheap clickbait and pro-Trump propaganda and care nothing about accurately informing their readers.
Even more stenography
Unruh served up even more Trump stenography in an April 10 article:
If you thought the USAID-funded gay sex comic books and DEI-promoting theatrical productions were bad, you probably thought the revelations about people who, allegedly, are more than 200 years old collecting Social Security payments were horrific.
It gets worse.
President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, under the directorship of Elon Musk, has confirmed that thousands of people who haven’t been born yet are demanding benefits be paid to them under the nation’s unemployment compensation programs.
[…]
The investigation so far as found more than 24,000 people over 115 years old claiming $59 million in benefits.
And 28,000 from 1 to 5 years old claiming $254 million.
Then there are the 9,700 people with birth dates more than 15 years in the future claiming $69 million in benefits.
DOGE said, “In one case, someone with a birthday in 2154 claimed $41k.”
Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s secretary of labor, said it’s another benefit for Americans, the DOGE team’s discovery of nearly $400 million in fraudulent unemployment payments.
“The Labor Department is committed to recovering Americans’ stolen tax dollars. We will catch these thieves and keep working to root out egregious fraud – accountability is here.”
Just one problem: these were known issues that predate the Trump administration, though Trump himself may be a part of it. The Associated Press reported:
Trump signed the COVID unemployment relief into law on March 27, 2020, and from the very start it became a magnet for fraud. In a memo to state officials about two weeks later, the Department of Labor warned that the expanded benefits had made unemployment programs “a target for fraud with significant numbers of imposter claims being filed with stolen or synthetic identities.”
That same memo offered an option for states trying to protect a person whose identity was stolen to fraudulently collect unemployment benefits. To preserve a record of the fraud but keep innocent people from being linked to it, states could create a “pseudo claim,” the memo advises.
Those “pseudo claims” led to records of toddlers and centenarians getting checks. The Labor Department’s inspector general tallied some 4,895 unemployment claims from people over the age of 100 between March 2020 and April 2022, but another departmental memo explained that the filings stemmed from states changing dates of birth to protect people whose identities were used.
In other words: DOGE is taking credit for finding fraud that others have previously found. Unruh hasn’t told his readers that, of course. Recall that he previously hyped DOGE claims of massive fraud in Social Security which were also known issues and didn’t even identify any actual fraud.
Unruh began a May 9 article with a rant about the previous president and a dubious comparison to the current one:
Congress already has investigated, and confirmed, that Joe Biden and his family took in tens of millions of dollars while he was vice president or president from what amounted to an influence peddling operation.
First Son Hunter Biden was part of the plans, and is described as repeatedly having sold access to his father to foreign interests.
Curiously, as that income pipeline no longer exists because the influence collapsed on Biden’s departure from the White House, there now are multiple reports that the family is looking for ways to start generating income.
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has promised, like in his first term, to donate his presidential salary of $400,000 a year.
Unruh then got to his usual stenographic spin:
But none of that stopped reporters whose agenda was made clear at the White House from suggesting that Trump was profiting from his presidential term.
“I think it’s frankly ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit. He left a life of luxury and a life of running a very successful real estate empire for public service, not just once, but twice. And again, the American public re-elected him back to this White House because they trust he acts in the best interests of our country and putting the country first.
“This is a president who actually has lost money for being president of the United States.
“I don’t remember these same type of questions being asked of my predecessor about a career politician who was clearly profiting off of this office.”
Unruh won’t report, however, that Leavitt is lying. Trump made $2.4 billion during his first term as president — and far surpassing the value of the salary he donated. That grifting has continued with his second term, with he and his family eager to cash in on his government actions and his selling access to the White House to people who buy his sketchy meme coin.
Looks like Trump is doing much better at profiting off the White House than the Bidens could have ever dreamed. But Unruh won’t tell you that because WND, like the Media Research Center, is Trump Regime Media.
Abrego Garcia stenography
WND joined the Media Research Center in misrepresenting the story of wrongly deported undocumented immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The headline of an April 13 article by Joe Kovacs asserted that Abrego Garcia was an “MS-13 gangster” despite a lack of evidence to back up that claim; in the article itself, Kovacs called him “a suspected member of the MS-13 gang,” though he uncritically allowed El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to call him a “terrorist.”
Unruh pushed the unsubstantiated MS-13 claim in an April 15 article:
In another high-profile deportation case, that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported even though he had a protective order aimed at preventing his deportation to El Salvador, the fight continues as the Supreme Court has ordered the government to facilitate his return, without explaining that requirement.
Further, El Salvado’s [sic] president said that will not happen, leaving a multitude of questions about how an administration is supposed to enter a foreign country and take back to the United States a prisoner the government there is unwilling to give up.
[…]
Reports reveal he entered the U.S. illegally in 2011 and has been described in court documents as a past member of the violent MS-13 gang, a declared terrorist group.
Unruh pushed another dubious claim about Abrego Garcia in an April 17 article:
Democrats have chosen to fight President Donald Trump to have returned to the United States an illegal alien who was deported to a prison in El Salvador.
The El Salvadoran president has confirmed the inmate is not being released or returned to the U.S., so that end of the arguments appear to be nearing a conclusion.
But the details about the inmate still are being revealed.
A report from the Daily Caller, for example, explains that Department of Homeland Security documents show that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an alleged member of MS-13, a terror organization, was stopped in 2022 on suspicion of human trafficking.
It was during a traffic stop by a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer that Garcia “was found to be transporting eight passengers across the country,” according to sources for the Tennessee Star.
“He allegedly did not have a valid driver’s license and was suspected of trafficking the passengers but was let go at the request of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the report confirmed.
Unruh didn’t mention that that Abrego Garcia told authorities the men were traveling for construction work. He went on to repeat the claim that Abrego Garcia “is identified as a member of MS-13.”
Unruh seved up more Trump administration stenography in an April 18 article:
The fight rages on, over whether an illegal alien deported by the Trump administration to a prison in El Salvador can be extricated from that prison and returned to America.
El Salvador’s president says no.
Further, whether judges in America can force President Trump to go into a foreign nation, retrieve one of its citizens from behind jail bars, and bring him back to America in a scenario that likely would lead to further deportation orders.
Amid all of this, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, traveled to El Salvador and insisted to officials there he had to meet with the inmate, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, pressuring them over and over until they relented and set up a photo opportunity.
Now Trump is calling Van Hollen a “fool.”
The Washington Examiner said Trump’s comment on social media was, “Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media, or anyone. GRANDSTANDER!!!”
WND also republished an article from the dubious Gateway Pundit claiming that Van Hollen had suffered a “humiliating rejection” in being initially prohibited from visiting Abrego Garcia, whom it insisted was an “MS-13 gang member.”
An anonymous WND writer snarked in an April 21 article:
Congressman Chris Van Hollen of Maryland has chosen to fight President Donald Trump’s national security and closed border campaign by advocating for a state resident who has been in the United States illegally for a number of years, and was subject to deportation.
The illegal, Kilmar Garcia, actually was removed to El Salvador’s famed anti-gang prison, and Trump critics have claimed he was not supposed to be sent to that country.
So Van Hollen went to El Salvador and hung around until officials let him have margaritas with the inmate, and came home to make a weekend-long round of talk shows on television.
In fact, Van Hollen has said that the margarita thing was a setup by Bukele — the glasses were placed on the table by Salvadoran officials halfway through the meeting and neither he nor Abrego Garcia drank them. The anonymous WND writer went on to quote an anonymous “report” calling Abrego Garcia an “MS-13 gang member.”
Unruh hyped the unsubstantiated claims again in an April 24 article:
The governor of Illinois, a far-left extremist who is very confident of the influence he wields, has promised to fight President Donald Trump over El Salvador’s custody of an El Salvadoran citizen who was determined likely to be an MS-13 gang member who was caught in an apparent human trafficking scandal and is known to have abused his wife.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a billionaire several times over, also promises to punish El Salvador, and is being ridiculed for his agenda.
Another anonymously written May 14 article complained:
With the vigor of a man defending his son from unjust accusations, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., in a Wednesday House hearing, repeatedly interrupted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., in her effort to enter into the record a long list of agencies that declared Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Venezuelan illegal alien deported to his home country, a member of MS-13, the murderous gang that has been designated a terrorist organization.
A May 20 article by Kovacs referenced “deported criminal illegal alien Kilmar Abrego Garcia,” even though he has no criminal record.