Revengeful Trump Attacks Blue States

SACRAMENTO, California — 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 childcare 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…

-Politico