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During his very loud and very long demagogic State of the Union speech, President Donald Trump railed about fraud in Minnesota, claiming members of the Somali immigrant community had “pillaged an estimated $19 billion.” That number, no surprise, was way off: Estimates for fraud in the state’s Medicaid program and other social welfare operations range between $1 billion and $9 billion over a number of years.
Announcing a “war on fraud,” Trump said he had tapped Vice President JD Vance to lead this effort. He also insisted that his administration could “find enough of that fraud” to “actually have a balanced budget overnight.” That was absurd. The deficit that Trump has helped to supersize is $1.8 trillion. Even if there were the same level of fraud in every state as Minnesota and every dime of the fraud were captured and sent to the federal treasury, the US government would be lucky to bank about $50 billion a year. That’s less than 3 percent of the deficit. Trump is not good at math.
But putting Vance in charge of this initiative is a smart move for Trump because no GOP politician does a better job of blending economic populism and racism. It’s Vance’s specialty.
Powerful interests, Vance says, deploy false accusations of racism to prevent people—white people, that is—from complaining about the economic hardships they face and from challenging the well-heeled who are playing them for suckers.
Look at his acceptance speech at the 2024 GOP convention. Vance praised the people of eastern Kentucky, his family’s ancestral home. It’s one of the poorest regions in the United States, but he hailed its residents as “very hardworking” and “good” people: “They’re the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back even if they can’t afford enough to eat.” He added, “And our media calls them privileged and looks down on them.” Vance maintained that these folks have been screwed over by ruling elites who have pushed economic policies that benefit the well-off and harm working-class families. (He must have forgotten Donald Trump’s first-term tax cut that heavily favored the wealthy.)
But back to “privileged.” Who refers to the low-income families of Appalachia as privileged? Vance did not explain this. But this sentence was something of a dog whistle and a callback to demagogic rhetoric that Vance has been slinging for years. He meant they are called “privileged” because they are white—as in “white privilege.”
As he has done before, Vance was merging working-class resentment and white racial grievance. In various venues, he has charged that plutocrats (whom he doesn’t name) are conspiring with the woke crowd (whoever they are) to silence Middle America. These powerful interests, Vance says, deploy false accusations of racism to prevent people—white people, that is—from complaining about the economic hardships they face and from challenging the well-heeled who are playing them for suckers. The elites are using woke-ism to economically exploit white working-class Americans.
This is how Vance put it in a 2021 interview with conservative talk show host Bill Cunningham:
Here’s what the elites do. When they say that those people are white privileged, they shut them up. ‘Look, you’re unhappy about your job being shipped overseas? You’re worried that a lawless southern border is going to cause the same poison that killed your daughter to also affect your grandbaby? Don’t you dare complain about that stuff. You are white privileged. You suffer from white rage’…What they do is use it as a power play so they can get us to shut up. So they can get us to stop complaining about our own country. And they get to run things without any control, without any pushback from the real people.
This is deft demagoguery. Two years ago, I described it this way:
Vance conflates legitimate concerns about economic power with racist paranoia. It’s much more sophisticated than the usual GOP playing of the race card. Instead, Vance fuses toxic culture wars to bread-and-butter issues. Look at how he weaved all this together when a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, [in 2023 and sparked a chemical fire]. Vance blamed Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his Department of Transportation’s racial equity initiatives for the catastrophe: “I’ve got to say, the Secretary of Transportation…talking about how we have too many white male construction workers instead of the fact that our trains are crashing…This guy needs to do his job.” So the good (white) folk of East Palestine were victimized supposedly because Buttigieg was spending too much time trying to help Black people.
His message: Wokeness is a tool of the wealthy to repress hardworking and decent white folks.
Now Trump is tying fraud to his anti-immigrant and racial bigotry. He has repeatedly targeted racist rants at Somali immigrants, exclaiming they are “garbage” and “destroying” Minnesota. “We don’t want them in our country,” he bellowed. In December, he said, “These Somalians have taken billions of dollars out of our country”—a baseless claim, even considering the fraud investigations in Minnesota. And for years he has race-baited Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who was born in Somalia. “She shouldn’t be allowed to be a congresswoman,” Trump said in one of his many outbursts directed at her.
This is a perfect opportunity for Vance: He can tell white working-class Americans pissed off by the economy, high prices, and government dysfunction that the problem lies with fraudster immigrants.
After getting elected by falsely asserting Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating dogs and cats, Trump switched to race-bashing the Somalis of Minnesota. And the fraud scandal—a true and troubling scandal in which most of the convicted perps so far are Somali immigrants—has supplied him and Vance plenty of ammunition.
Now the pair can readily associate an immigrant community with serious fraud, while raising questions about the value and effectiveness of safety net programs. (Why fund them if the money is being stolen?) Trump can signal to his MAGA base that the United States would somehow be more prosperous—it would not have this yawning deficit—were it not for these people of color ripping off government programs.
Vance is much experienced in delivering such a false and hate-infused narrative. He can tell white working-class Americans pissed off by the economy, high prices, and government dysfunction that the problem lies with these fraudster immigrants. Dump the blame on those shifty migrants who are cheating salt-of-the-earth Americans and stealing their tax dollars. This is a perfect opportunity for Vance. When it comes to exploiting racism to pose as a phony populist, he’s the best.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.