Trump Is The First President To Use Violence To Crack Down On Welfare Fraud

Outrage over welfare cheats used to prompt calls for reform, not paramilitary operations.

On the presidential campaign trail in 1976, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan (R) repeatedly told audiences about an Illinois woman who had used false identities to steal thousands of dollars from the government.

“She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four non-existent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare,” Reagan told a lunch crowd in Asheville, North Carolina, adding that “her tax-free cash income alone has been running $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 a furor over welfare fraud, both real and imagined. The uproar would lead to an increase in 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 are telling about Minnesota today fit into the same tradition, one that predates Reagan and will likely live beyond this administration. For as long as the U.S. government has provided financial assistance to the poor, stories about people cheating the system — often true, sometimes exaggerated — have enraged certain elements of the public.

That rage, however, has always played out within the normal Democratic process: through op-eds, court rulings, prosecutions and legislative reforms. They have not, until Trump and Minnesota, resulted in state-sanctioned violence.