Did Malia Obama say she "deserved every penny of the $2.3 million she got from USAID" and was this payment reported by a news website or public official? No, that's not true: The quote about the USAID payment originated on a satirical Facebook page with a clear disclaimer. The page owner is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content.
The claim appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) published on February 11, 2025, on a Facebook page named "America's Last Line Of Defense." It featured the following text:
Malia Obama says she deserved every penny of the $2.3 million she got from USAID:
"I provided penpal services for dozens of lonely kids in impoverished countries."
She wrote letters. To "dozens" of kids. For $2.3 million.
She needs to pay that money back.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed Feb 12 21:54:23 2025 UTC)
On February 9, 2025 the page posted a similar meme (archived here) that mentioned an amount of $2.2 million instead:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed Feb 12 22:14:53 2025 UTC)
Lead Stories searched for stories with the phrases "Malia Obama" and "USAID" using Google News (archived here) and no news articles about any such payment were returned.
The Facebook page (archived here) where the claim originated had a description that read:
The flagship of the ALLOD network of trollery and propaganda for cash.
Nothing on this page is real.
According to the page transparency tab of the page it was run by "Busta Troll," which is the nickname of Christopher Blair.
Christopher Blair is a self-professed liberal from Maine who for years has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives with made-up news items in order to get them to share his posts. A 2018 BBC profile called Blair "the Godfather of fake news," describing him as "one of the world's most prolific writers of disinformation."
His websites usually have multiple satire disclaimers and the stories very often contain obvious hints they are not real, like category names indicating they are fiction, links to "sources" that instead go to funny or offensive images or an "S for Satire" logo added to the images used as illustration. Another telltale sign is the name "Art Tubolls" (anagram for "Busta Troll") for characters in the stories. Blair also frequently pays homage to two of his friends who passed away by using their names ("Joe Barron" and "Sandy Batt") in stories.
Blair's stories have been widely copied by spammy, foreign website networks trying to make a buck by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
Here you can find some of the many, many stories from Blair's websites debunked by Lead Stories over the years.
