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In his State of the Union address, President Trump mentioned his vice president only once. It came after he denounced the state of Minnesota, blaming Somali-Americans for fraud that had occurred there in nutrition and child care programs funded by the government.
“I am officially announcing the war on fraud to be led by our great Vice President JD Vance. He’ll get it done,” Trump said. “And we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight. It’ll go very quickly.”
Just FYI, the budget deficit in 2025 was $1.78 trillion, so the most successful fraud crackdown ever wouldn’t make much of a dent in that. But worry not: JD is on the case.
The truth is that Vance’s “war on fraud” is a phantom, a PR effort that will likely uncover no misdeeds that weren’t already known to the government’s actual fraud investigators. Vance’s pretend fight against fraud is the real fraud, and it’s just what we might expect from the most corrupt president and most corrupt administration in history.
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Indeed, it’s stunning that this administration has the gall to pretend even for a moment that fraud is something they care about.
This “anti-fraud” campaign will not go after cryptocurrency fraud — the president uses crypto payoffs to expand his wealth by billions while the administration shuts down crypto investigations. White-collar crime enforcement has been dramatically scaled back, so it’s not as though Vance will be looking for fraud on Wall Street. The words “wage theft” may never have passed the lips of any high-ranking Trump administration official, despite the fact that it costs American workers an estimated $15 billion per year. Trump ordered the government to stop enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars US companies from paying bribes overseas. And speaking of bribes, if you’ve already been convicted and are looking for a pardon from Trump, those are essentially for sale.
Thanks to Trump, there has seldom been a better time to be a fraudster.
Even when they weren’t so spectacularly corrupt, conservatives spent a lot of time complaining about government fraud; it was one of the big three items in Ronald Reagan’s “waste, fraud, and abuse,” which he promised to banish. The problem is that when Republicans say they want to crack down on fraud, what they almost always mean is that they want to undermine, delegitimize, and defund programs they nev