How Trump Is Trying to Make 'Fraud' the New DOGE
At an Oval Office press conference last week that could be euphemistically framed as, uh, freewheeling,1 President Trump focused on a second term obsession: fraud. It’s the root justification for many unpopular actions by his administration – be it gutting the federal workforce, attacking Social Security, making it harder, especially for women, to vote, and even for his toxic immigration raids in Minnesota.
Leaning into his favorite trope, Trump noted that immigrants “have been cheating for years” when Stephen Miller claimed that “if all of this theft were stopped, it would be enough to balance the budget. The extraction of wealth from American taxpayers to people who don’t belong here is the primary cause of the national debt.”
This is not just untrue, it is a lie on the scale of Elon Musk claiming he would eliminate the deficit. Absolutely fantastical, a kind of fraudulent fraud claim, one untethered from the surly bonds of reason and evidence. The reality, according to an analysis from the libertarian Cato Institute, is the opposite: immigrants have significantly reduced the deficit, contributing a fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion between 1993-2023.
Trump especially pushed the false claim that Somalis had stolen $19 billion in Minnesota. $19 billion? A Department of Justice prosecutor suggested that half of the state’s Medicaid spending of $18 billion might be fraudulent, but offered no underlying data for the estimate. Indeed, the federal government’s own data points to Minnesota being effective at controlling waste in its Medicaid program. But Trump has repeated his fabricated $19 billion claim repeatedly, regardless.
https://www.lincolnsquare.media/p/how-trump-is-trying-to-make-fraud
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