Trump’s unusual' new obsession proves his pitch to voters is a 'scam'

President Donald Trump's right-wing populism has long been core to his pitch to voters, but according to MS NOW, it has all been a "scam," and his "unusual" new obsession proves it.

In a piece published Monday morning, MS NOW's Zeeshan Aleem highlighted reports that the Trump administration has been "escalating its efforts to crack down on suspected small-scale fraud involving government-funded programs," putting "an inordinate focus" on small-time offenses. He argued that this push "should be understood as a bid to vilify programs meant to help vulnerable people," as well as an effort to distract from his own fraud.

"The New York Times pointed out the Justice Department’s new and unusual focus on small-dollar fraud," Aleem explained. "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."

He added: "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."

The preponderance of these cases going after alleged SNAP fraud, which is extremely rare, serves as proof that the administration is looking for "a pretext for vilifying those programs and wrongly characterizing them as widely misused." Coupled with similar tactics used to attack Medicaid, Aleem argued that these examples show that Trump continues to wage a "war against the poor." At the same time, he has massively scaled back federal efforts to crack down on "more consequential fraud" cases, including white-collar fraud. Trump has also issued a striking number of pardons for individuals convicted of white-collar 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," Aleem added. "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?"

He concluded: "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"