Voters under 50 probably won’t remember the “welfare queen”. But she once embodied Republicans’ claim of the underlying reason for US societal decay: the poor are a bunch of fraudsters. Ronald Reagan introduced Linda Taylor to US voters at a rally during the Republican presidential primary season in 1976.
A resident of Chicago’s South Side, Taylor had been arrested for welfare fraud. But she wasn’t living on anything near $150,000. Josh Levin, author of The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth, points out that she was only ever charged with stealing $9,000.
And yet, Reagan leveraged Taylor’s story to slash spending on welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, public housing and job training. This woman of color on the bottom rungs of society – born out of a forbidden encounter in the deep south between a white mother and a black father – justified the proposition that to weed out corruption, the first place to look was among the (nonwhite) poor. Half a century on, the Trump administration is dipping into the old imagery to buttress a violent campaign against what’s left of the US’s social safety net, and distract voters from the industrial-scale corruption that is, indeed, sinking America: the self-dealing by the president, his family and his friends.
Pages from Reagan’s 1980s playbook are being used to justify initiatives to eviscerate the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), and government-subsidized health insurance by claiming fraud by less fortunate Americans who, evidently, are learned in the art of grift. The most recent discovery, announced by JD Vance’s anti-fraud taskforce, amounted to $40m defrauded from Snap. This came on the heels of Vance’s gleeful announcement that the administration had nixed the health coverage of 760,000 people insured under Obamacare on grounds of fraud.
And it meshed nicely with Donald Trump’s offer of a bounty to whoever catches moochers grifting off the government’s dime. Trump probably thinks this is smart politics. But Americans are becoming alarmed over the corruption popping up all over the news.
An October Harris poll for the Guardian found that government corruption is the second most important issue for voters heading to the polls, second only to the rising cost of living. Eighty-seven percent of respondents to the poll said corruption was a problem, a greater share than those worried about AI or immigration. And yet there’s a hole in the president’s logic.
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