President Donald Trump always seems to be cooking up some new scheme to profit off the presidency. And yet his administration is escalating its efforts to crack down on suspected small-scale fraud involving government-funded programs. Trump’s inordinate focus on relatively minor offenses should be understood as a bid to vilify programs meant to help vulnerable people. It also serves as a tool to distract from the misbehavior of him and his cronies.
The New York Times pointed out the Justice Department’s new and unusual focus on small-dollar fraud. A food truck in Santa Ana, California, caught prosecutors’ attention because of a suspiciously large proportion of transactions using Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program cards. A cashier at a Los Angeles grocery store was accused of accepting about $10,000 worth of SNAP (food stamps) cards as payment and giving undercover federal immigration officers cash for them.
Trump himself is exploiting the extraordinary power of the presidency in ways that constitute a defrauding of the public.
These are striking low-level cases for federal law enforcement. As the Times notes, federal prosecutors have “generally observed minimum-dollar thresholds in fraud cases, and in many U.S. attorney’s offices in large cities, “the threshold sits around half a million dollars.” Jacqueline Kelly, a former federal prosecutor, told the Times that a food truck “is not the kind of case you would typically see federal law enforcement resources being poured into.” Such cases are typically handled by state or local officials.
One thing that stands out about these cases, beyond how relatively minor they seem, is that they involve people allegedly misusing SNAP benefits. Fraud using SNAP benefits is rare. But in the eyes of the Trump administration, people cheating government programs often serve as a pretext for vilifying those programs and wrongly characterizing them as widely misused. For example, in the spring, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins promoted unconfirmed claims that thousands of SNAP benefits recipients were driving luxury vehicles. Considering the Trump administration has used allegations of Medicaid fraud as a rationale for cutting off Medicaid to states, this new emphasis on low-level fraud may double as his way to make a case that states should be cut off from SNAP funding. The argument more broadly is that federally funded social services are not worth the cost. Amplifying allegations of fraud in these programs, then, is yet another way Trump wages war against the poor.
Over the course of his second term Trump has scaled back efforts to crack down on more consequential fraud. As the Times report notes, between the start of Trump’s second term and May, the Trump administration has brought fewer white-collar cases than former President Joe Biden did, Trump’s first administration did and former President Barack Obama did during comparable periods. Among other measures, the administration has diverted resources from white-collar crime enforcement and effectively narrowed the definition of white-collar crime. This is happening alongside an extraordinary spree of pardons and commutations of high-profile, ultrawealthy people convicted of fraud, many of whom are his political allies.
And, of course, Trump himself is exploiting the extraordinary power of the presidency in ways that constitute a defrauding of the public — even if the law doesn’t prohibit it. Why should a man entrusted to head the state be able to own a vast array of assets that people can use to curry favor with him and which he can and does enlarge through his own policymaking?
Once again, we can see the perverse logic of right-wing populism. We see who gets painstakingly scrutinized and who gets gentle treatment. MAGA politicians claim to be defending the interests of everyday Americans, but in reality, they serve as handmaidens to the rich and the powerful, while using misinformation and culture wars to sell an economic program that screws over working people.
Right-wing populism is a scam. Trump’s permissiveness toward wealthy fraudsters and fixation on rendering government programs as fraudulent helps prove it.
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