Trump is the first president to use violence to combat welfare fraud

During the 1976 presidential campaign, former California Governor Ronald Reagan (R) repeatedly spoke to the public about an Illinois woman who had used false identities to steal thousands of dollars from the government.

“She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 phone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four non-existent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare,” Reagan said during a lunch in Asheville, North Carolina, adding that “her tax-free cash income alone has amounted to $150,000 a year.”

The shocking story, based on a real-life woman named Linda Taylor who had been the subject of extensive reporting in Illinois newspapers, helped fuel the furor over welfare fraud, both real and imagined. The uproar would lead to increased prosecutions and lay the groundwork for the eventual dismantling of the federal government’s main cash program for poor single mothers.

The stories President Donald Trump and his allies tell today about Minnesota fit into the same tradition, one that predates Reagan and will likely endure beyond this administration. For as long as the American government has provided financial assistance to the poor, stories about people cheating the system (often true, sometimes exaggerated) have infuriated certain sectors of the public.

That rage, however, has always manifested itself within the normal Democratic process: through op-eds, court rulings, prosecutions, and legislative reforms. Until Trump and Minnesota, they had not led to state-sanctioned violence.

Trump this month sent more than 2,000 federal law enforcement agents to Minnesota in response to fraud allegations against Somali Americans, even though federal prosecutors had already brought charges against nearly 100 people, the vast majority of whom were of Somali descent, as the White House likes to point out.

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Federal agents are “taking the fight to these sanctuary jurisdictions that allow these criminal and illegal aliens to roam the streets and take advantage of public assistance that should be available to all tax-paying Americans,” said Todd Lyons, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. explained to Newsmax when officers deployed in early January.

Molly Michelmore, a historian at Washington and Lee University who has written a book on trends in welfare policy, said Trump’s militarized police response to welfare fraud was unprecedented in American history.

“I can’t think of anything like that,” Michelmore told News themezone. “It has not been the armed police forces that have broken into the communities.”

There has been extensive and well-documented welfare fraud in Minnesota, with some 98 criminal defendants accused of embezzling hundreds of millions in federal funds by billing the government for social services they did not actually provide to needy Minnesotans. While ICE agents had been deployed to the state since October, the Trump administration increased the workforce to current levels after a viral video allegedly showed daycares run by Somalis containing no children.

Now the clampdown on Minnesota appears to have taken on a life of its own, and immigration authorities have responded violently to protesters, even shooting an American woman to death in her car. This incident has sparked even more protests and threats from the president to send in the US military. Several of the U.S. attorneys who led federal government fraud prosecutions in Minnesota also resigned after the administration pressured them to investigate the murdered woman’s spouse.

The Department of Homeland Security has highlighted its arrests of suspected criminal illegal immigrants in Minneapolis, but has not revealed any connection to the underlying fraud. In response to a request for an update on its fraud investigation, the department referred News themezone to a Monday social media update from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem that said agency investigators “are on the ground in Minneapolis conducting large-scale investigations to obtain justice for the American people who have been robbed blind.”

In a statement, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the administration’s response simply matches the scale of crimes committed under the watch of Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Democratic Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, both of whom now face criminal investigations by the Justice Department.

“The size and scale of the Trump administration’s response to Minnesota is directly related to the size and scale of the absolutely massive fraud scandal unfolding in the state, enabled by Democratic politicians like Walz and Frey,” Jackson said. “Minnesota Democrats have allowed Somali scammers to rip off hard-working Americans, and this cannot continue. The Trump administration will unapologetically enforce the law.”

On Tuesday, Trump appeared at the White House press conference and showed photos of some of the people ICE arrested in Minnesota. While most of the suspects whose mugshots ICE highlighted were not from Somalia, Trump shared his thoughts about the people of that war-torn country.

“They don’t have anything resembling a country. And if it is a country, it’s considered one of the worst in the world,” Trump said. “They come here, they get rich and they don’t have a job.”

Despite the unprecedented nature of the situation, there are still parallels between what is happening in Minnesota and past welfare scandals, Michelmore said.

“They’re telling a story about widespread criminal fraud on a particular racially identifiable group that then, because they are defined as inherently criminal, justifies these kinds of repressive measures,” Michelmore said. “They’re not really interested in welfare fraud… It’s a way of talking about racial politics without using words and phrases that are no longer allowed to be used in the post-1965 era.”

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Following the passage of the Social Security laws in the 1930s, which created federal unemployment insurance, old-age benefits and welfare programs, journalists wrote stories about women cheating on the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which was designed to provide cash assistance to single mothers.

In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, newspapers described women who hid their lovers, lied about their poverty, and used their welfare benefits to buy meat. The scandals prompted FBI investigations, crackdowns by state governments and sustained complaints about people taking advantage of the government.

Ronald Reagan then made Linda Taylor, already dubbed the “welfare queen” by the press, a key part of his speech during his failed 1976 presidential campaign. Although Reagan got some details wrong, Taylor really was an unabashed fabulist in the style of George Santos. Taylor was also worse than Reagan let on, as she was suspected of murder and kidnapping, in addition to the various felony fraud charges that ultimately landed her in prison.

However, the details were almost irrelevant. The purpose of Reagan’s anti-welfare rhetoric was to create an us-versus-them mentality among white voters.

jose levina journalist whose book about taylor He tracked the rise of anti-welfare policies since the 1930s and said attacks on Somali Americans in Minnesota are a continuation of the pattern.

“If there is a group that is already villainized, or that is a convenient scapegoat, then if you find a real example of fraud or a crime being committed, then naturally it will be elevated,” Levin told News themezone.

Increased public attention to fraud has led to increased surveillance by states and the federal government. Between 1970 and 1979, the number of AFDC cases referred to law enforcement increased from 7,500 to more than 52,000, Levin reported in his book.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton won the presidency in part on a promise to “end welfare as we know it,” and he did. Clinton signed a bill that transformed AFDC from an open-ended promise of cash benefits to low-income single mothers to a limited grant that states could use for benefits and services.

Ironically, the government’s decision to emphasize services over direct benefits created an opportunity for Minnesota scammers to serve as middlemen and defraud the government on a scale that no individual welfare queen could have achieved.

“We’re in this era where Trump is really pushing anti-immigrant rhetoric. And so in every era, we have a variety of welfare scandals that, I don’t want to say we deserve, but we have the variety of welfare scandals that fits the times,” Levin said.