These days, it’s hard to tell if Donald Trump is mocking JD Vance again, or if the president is just sleepy. “He looks like Eliot Ness,” the president declared of his veep in a televised Cabinet meeting in May while high-level administration officials pretended to laugh. “You ever see Eliot Ness,” Trump continued, saying Vance’s posture “looks like a movie.” It appears the nearly 80-year-old president confused the infamous Prohibition agent with Kevin Costner’s portrayal of Ness in the 1987 film “The Untouchables.”
Trump, who is reportedly growing ever more impatient with the vice president, was probably taunting Vance with such an implausible comparison. Still, the reference to 1930s-era Chicago law enforcement was apt, because it was an era of police lawlessness, where unconstitutional practices like the third-degree were justified as necessary to stopping organized crime. Vance, along with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, are similarly embracing the view that law, morality and ethics should not get in the way of their radical political agenda. But unlike Ness, who did have real crime to deal with, the justifications Vance and Miller deploy are baseless nonsense.
The duo’s latest tough-guy act is built around elaborate accusations that immigrants are defrauding the government on a scale that, if true, would rate as one of the worst corruption scandals in history. In late May, the Vance and Miller helmed a public meeting — really, a press stunt — for an alleged “task force” charged with looking into the purported fraud. But the biggest charlatans were Vance and Miller themselves, with their false claims that immigrants are becoming unbelievably wealthy by stealing from the government.
“We could balance the federal budget if the only dollars that went out of the treasury went to individuals who were properly, lawfully, correctly eligible to receive them,” Miller said.
Since this accusation came from the same group who spread the lie that Haitian refugees steal people’s pets and eat them, it should be self-evident that Miller was lying. Indeed, fact checkers showed that to be the case, noting that the federal government’s budget deficit in 2025 was $1.8 trillion, and fraud is, even with the most generous estimates, only a small fraction of that number. To give a sense of how ridiculous Miller’s claim is: There are approximately 52 million immigrants living in the U.S. To reach $1.8 trillion, every single one would have to be stealing nearly $35,000 a year from government coffers.
But this whopper was embedded in an event that was pushing, albeit more subtly, another false implication: that “fraud” primarily involves immigrants receiving welfare benefits that are supposed to only go to American citizens. Though Republicans at the event carefully avoided the words “migrants” or “immigrants” — though Miller did indulge himself by blaming the “Somalia refugee problem,” as if Somali refugees weren’t welcomed in Minnesota in the late 1990s — they leaned heavily on dog whistles that point all the blame at immigrants.
First, there was the massive Minnesota food assistance fraud case, which Republicans blame on Somali-Americans, even though the woman at the center of it, Aimee Bock, is white — and her victims included many food pantries and schools that serve a racially diverse community. There are also mentions of Medicaid fraud in Arizona and California, which flew under most Americans’ radars but have been a big deal in right-wing circles because some of the folks involved, though far from all, have foreign-sounding names.
Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Sign up for her free newsletter, Standing Room Only, now also on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
As these real cases show, there is a fraud problem in health and welfare spending in the U.S. But it’s not on the scale that the White House is saying, nor is it the result of immigration as they are implying. A lot of the problems stem from the Covid-19 pandemic, where the rapid expansion of government spending to protect the economy, coupled with an anemic federal infrastructure to manage it, opened the door to fraudsters. Another issue is the reliance on block grants, instead of direct spending on people in need, which has expanded under decades of GOP pressure. These grants are often wasteful on their own, but they also make it easier for fraudsters to get their hands into the piggy bank. And considering how much Trump has slashed the federal work force, the very people who can detect and eradicate fraud in federal programs, it’s implausible that the White House actually cares about this issue.
But there’s just enough truth to the claim that fraud happens for the lies to piggyback on. And while Vance and Miller speak in vague terms, they’re relying on popular MAGA propagandist Nick Shirley to fill the in the immigrant-baiting gaps for their audience.
Shirley rose to fame in 2025 with shady videos claiming to expose daycare fraud in Minnesota. His story was quickly debunked, but it didn’t stop the White House from using his false claims as a pretext to flood Minneapolis with immigration enforcement, a move that soon turned to violence against the community that led to two shooting deaths of citizens at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers.
It’s all to spin a larger, false narrative of evil immigrants overrunning blue states, aided by daft Democratic leaders too dazzled by wokeness to recognize the alleged truth that only racists will admit: Immigrants are out to prey on white Americans.
Despite his role in fueling the violence, Shirley has not slowed down. He’s been putting out a steady stream of videos full of unlikely — and often swiftly debunked — allegations of welfare and voter fraud, mostly in California. It’s all to spin a larger, false narrative of evil immigrants overrunning blue states, aided by daft Democratic leaders too dazzled by wokeness to recognize the alleged truth that only racists will admit: Immigrants are out to prey on white Americans. But as anyone familiar with MAGA social media knows, the truth doesn’t really matter. Any content alleging “fraud,” especially if a non-white face can be forefronted in the images, quickly goes viral in right-wing circles.
Shirley’s shamelessness has metastasized in recent weeks in response to California Assembly Bill 2624, which would expand privacy protections currently offered to domestic violence victims and healthcare providers to people who provide legal and other services to immigrants. The legislation would allow people in these fields to keep their home address secret, a provision resulting from harassment and death threats many have received for offering perfectly legal services to immigrants. But Shirley, ever the self-promoter, is calling it the “Stop Nick Shirley Act,” and portraying himself as a victim of censorship because he can’t access and publish the home address of an immigration lawyer or a nurse whose clinic serves an immigrant community.
When Salon reached out to the bill’s author, Assemblywoman Mia Bonta, her office sent a link to this statement: “People working in immigrant services are being followed home, receiving death threats, and having their personal information weaponized against them.”
Shirley’s claim that the bill puts “journalists at civil risk for investigating fraud” is false on multiple levels. Legitimate journalists investigating fraud don’t need to follow people who work in social or health services home, even if they suspect they might be involved in such a thing. But the bigger lie is Shirley presenting himself as a “journalist,” when he eschews basic responsibility to the facts.
Spring savings are here!
The right’s fixation on immigrant fraud is a real Russian nesting doll of lies. If Vance and Miller were actual stewards of the public trust, they wouldn’t work for Trump. They would be focused on releasing the still-secretive details of his ongoing corruption and trying to block his $1.8 billion slush fund, which will be funded with taxpayer money and is clearly meant to pay off his cronies and people who commit crimes on his behalf. They would be releasing the Epstein files and opening the books on Trump’s various “fundraising” schemes for everything from his White House ballroom to his purported presidential library. Anyone who actually cared about fraud would do everything in their power to eject the convicted felon who is currently stinking up the Oval Office.
The right’s war on immigrants is about racism and bigotry. But it’s also a pathetic bid for power from Vance and Miller, who both seem to see the immigration issue as a way to keep the MAGA gravy train going after Trump. But they are likely to be mistaken. There is no doubt a minority of Americans who salivate with racism sadism every time they hear a story, true or not, about an immigrant breaking the law. But after the recent horrors and deaths inflicted on the country by Trump’s mass deportation campaign, most Americans — including a reported 25% of the president’s 2024 voters — now oppose the administration’s immigration agenda. The steady drumbeat of dubious or misleading stories about fraud aren’t drowning out the horrifying videos of ICE agents abusing innocent civilians, or the massive protests at detention centers accused of neglect and torture of undocumented immigrants. “Fraud” may end up being not just a phony gambit, but weak tea — especially in the face of very real fascism.
Read more
about Trump’s immigration crackdown
The post JD Vance goes all in on immigrant fraud hoax appeared first on Salon.com.
from Salon.com https://ift.tt/wtWHys1
Hello, my name is Asma E Nur. I am a tech blogger.
No comments:
Post a Comment