Journalists across a range of news outlets all pushed a version of the same story on Monday and Tuesday: the Trump administration purged the Spanish-language pages from the White House website.
Headlines like “Spanish version of WhiteHouse.gov goes dark in Trump’s America” gave readers the impression that the lack of a Spanish webpage was tied to Trump’s positions on immigration. The New York Daily News ran a story claiming the website changes “show a radical overhaul of the website to align with some of President Trump’s most controversial policy priorities.”
Spain’s foreign minister even weighed in on the apparent purge, saying it was “not a good idea.”
But the actual story is far different from the one being portrayed in the media: the Trump White House is in the process of building a new website with the same domain as the Obama White House. The Obama White House website has been preserved online and is still accessible — at a different domain.
The current White House hasn’t built a Spanish webpage yet but is reportedly in the process of assembling one.
The Trump White House website does not yet have a page dedicated to religious liberty, either — not because the Trump administration is waging a war on religious liberty (a core issue among social conservatives) but because the page has yet to be added to the website.
The Obama White House’s Spanish website had little more than biographies of the Obama and Biden families until October 2009, nine months into the Obama era.
This isn’t the first time the media pushed dishonest narrative about “missing” White House pages.
Liberal journalists previously tried to claim that the White House LGBT webpage had been similarly purged within hours of Trump’s inaugural address. That story, too, was bunk. (RELATED: Here’s What Really Happened With The ‘Missing’ White House LGBT Page)