The attacks ramping up.......

‘Brace for impact’: Trump turns fraud into new weapon against blue states

The president is capitalizing on an issue that has proven potent in Minnesota.

By Blake Jones, Jeremy B. White and Nick Reisman

Donald Trump has found a new way to bludgeon blue states: accuse them of fraud, then move to cut off their money.

The attacks ramping up across the map — from Albany and Springfield to Denver and Sacramento — follow Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz ending his reelection campaign amid allegations of welfare fraud in his state, a case Trump’s MAGA allies seized to cast similar aspersions at other Democratic leaders.

The Trump administration cited unproven fraud allegations last week as it put a hold on $10 billion in child care funding to five Democratic-run states. The Department of Justice announced it’s launching a new division of fraud enforcement, pointing to Minnesota’s “fraud epidemic.” And in California, acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said he’s pursuing additional charges of fraud involving state homelessness programs after railing for months against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s management of state spending.

“I’ll say one thing about our president: He told us he was going to do this,” Manhattan Democrat Liz Krueger, the influential chair of the New York Senate Finance Committee, said of the administration’s funding cuts. “He told us he was going to punish blue states. We have to brace for impact, we have to use our legal skills, our amazing attorney general, and endless lawsuits to at least hold them back.”

The spending-focused line of attack from Trump marks an escalation in Trump’s already red-hot war on blue states. While hostilities between Trump and Democratic-led states on immigration intensify following shootings in Minnesota and Oregon, he is now moving more aggressively on a separate track to cut off states’ funding. And if “waste, fraud and abuse” is a familiar rallying cry for Republicans, it is now serving as fresh ammunition for Trump’s targeting of his political adversaries.

“He’s attacking blue states out of revenge,” said Democratic Rep. Brad Schneider of Illinois. “If that’s in the form of sending in ICE, he sends in ICE. If it’s denying food and education to their children, which to be clear are America’s children, he’s gonna do that. What he is doing is seeking revenge at the cost of America’s most vulnerable people, putting those communities at risk.”

Trump’s offensive is already roiling politics in targeted states, where Democrats have largely chosen between two approaches to fending off the administration: casting the allegations as baseless or leaning into the risk of fraud and vowing to police it themselves.

That choice drove a wedge between prominent California Democrats even before Trump moved to cut off funds. Rep. Eric Swalwell, while saying that “Donald Trump looking for fraud is like OJ looking for the real killer,” nevertheless incorporated the issue into his campaign for governor by proposing a program rewarding state employees who identify misspending.

Meanwhile, Newsom’s office pushed back after Rep. Ro Khanna asserted, with dubious evidence, that California had lost $72 billion to fraud and called for more federal scrutiny. Khanna, also a potential presidential contender, has argued Democrats must crack down on wasteful spending if they are to build public trust.

“My view is there is mismanagement and inefficient spending that we need to account for, in California and in states across the country,” Khanna said in an interview.

From the Newsom administration’s perspective, Khanna was unhelpfully amplifying a conservative talking point underpinned by questionable math. Republicans at the highest level have hammered the $72 billion figure, which appears to be an amalgam of previously reported unemployment fraud, high-speed rail expenditures and spending programs flagged by the state’s auditor for being vulnerable to fraud or poorly tracked.

Newsom has worked to flip the script by arguing Trump squandered taxpayer money with a National Guard deployment blocked by the courts, while his office posted an AI-generated image of the governor punching a man wearing a shirt reading “FRAUD” and mocking Vice President JD Vance for labeling as fraud the state’s provision of health insurance to undocumented patients.

In New York, Democrats were alarmed by the Trump administration’s decision to yank funding and have already signaled plans to file legal challenges. But the president’s broadside is scrambling the fraught election-year politics facing New York Gov. Kathy Hochul.

A moderate Democrat who speaks frequently with the president, Hochul condemned the move and vowed to fight it in court.

“It’s this depth of cruelty,” she told MSNOW. “They think they’re going to get to me, but the kids are the political pawns in this process, and they’re not doing that calculation.”

Hochul has already tangled with Trump over his administration’s unsuccessful efforts to kill a controversial Manhattan toll plan, which is meant to generate cash for New York City area mass transit projects.

Still, some New York Democrats wish the state were more aggressive in counteracting Trump’s efforts to mold blue states’ political destinies. And Trump’s cuts are bolstering calls to hike taxes on rich people in California and New York, a move both states’ governors oppose.

“It’s going to require us to really do what we should be doing, which is sharing our prosperity here in New York,” Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado, who is challenging Hochul in a June primary, said in an interview. “Obviously his decision is disgusting, immoral and deeply regrettable. That being said, New York has a responsibility to step up and do what we can. If that means raising revenue, we should.”

The development arrives at a delicate time for Hochul and newly inaugurated New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The two Democrats are pursuing the creation of a free child care program — a politically popular, but expensive measure that’s expected to cost $15 billion once fully phased in.

Mamdani, who had a surprisingly chummy visit with Trump after his election last year where they bonded over sharing voters in the Big Apple, called the cuts “a cruel decision.”

In Colorado, the Trump administration is threatening a $24 million cut over commercial drivers licenses it says were illegally issued to immigrants. The state’s Democratic attorney general in a court filing Thursday accused the president of waging a “revenge campaign” by withholding funding and declining to release a pardoned elections clerk from prison, according to local media reports.

The state was also targeted with the child care funding freeze, as were Illinois, New York, Minnesota and California. All five states are suing in an attempt to access the money, and a federal judge temporarily blocked the cuts on Friday in response.

For Republicans, the scandal in Minnesota served not only as fresh justification for cuts targeting blue states, but also demonstrated the effectiveness of a fraud-focused line of attack.

“There’s no bigger political target on the landscape than Gavin Newsom,” said Jon Fleischman, a former executive director of the California GOP. “So if you go into Minnesota and uncover this kind of fraud, why wouldn’t you want to look at whether or not this kind of fraud is going on in California?”

A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

In the wake of Walz dropping his reelection campaign, Democrats are laboring to contain the blast radius, fearing that even unsubstantiated allegations could resonate with voters.

“The withholding of funds, that’s a huge headache. But the other headache is that when the president says stuff like this, it undermines people’s confidence in government,” said California state Sen. Tom Umberg, a Democrat and former federal prosecutor. “It creates unnecessary turmoil based on nothing but fabricated allegations.”

In response, some Democratic operatives are warning against being drawn into a debate about public spending that focuses on potential fraud rather than on the people who benefit from a robust social safety net.

“Donald Trump is weaponizing the federal government in order to harm poor people and exert dominance over his foes,” said Mike Shimpock, a Los Angeles based consultant. “The debate isn’t: ‘Is there fraud in social services?’ The debate is: Are you creating a government that’s run for billionaires and corporations?”

Elizabeth Ashford, a consultant whose clients include California’s Assembly speaker, Robert Rivas, argued California’s extensive system of budget oversight committees and audits is effectively policing the system.

“Trump is in panic, wag-the-dog mode, and of course he is only going after Democratic governors — that’s how he operates,” Ashford said, drawing a parallel between Trump threatening childcare funding and California struggling to wring more wildfire assistance out of the federal government.

“We’ve already paid for this stuff,” Ashford said. “Now he’s going to take this money and move it around to red states? It’s disgusting.”