Trump Celebrates His Fraud Crackdown in Blue States as Arrests Begin

Donald Trump’s so-called fraud crackdown will soon be coming to a (Democrat-led) state near you.

On Friday, the president celebrated the beginning of the crackdown, claiming that fraud is being committed “primarily in those Blue States where CROOKED DEMOCRAT POLITICIANS, like those in California, Illinois, Minnesota (Somalia beware!), Maine, New York, and many others, have had a ‘free for all.’”

Trump added that Vice President JD Vance would become America’s “FRAUD CZAR,” a title that sounds amusingly like Vance is being tapped to commit fraud.

A day earlier, the Justice Department arrested eight people in California allegedly involved in health care fraud schemes netting more than $50 million.

Most of the California fraud consists of hospice centers allegedly filing false Medicare claims to receive federal funds for patients who did not need them. Hospice centers located in Artesia, Glendale, Tarzana, and Simi Valley—all cities and suburbs surrounding Los Angeles—were caught up in the DOJ raid.

The most egregious alleged fraudster is the owner of an Artesia hospice center who paid middlemen to refer fake hospice patients to her. The DOJ claims she submitted more than $9 million in fake Medicare claims and was paid over $8.5 million, and that one couple at the center said they were told they could receive $300 a month each if they signed up for hospice care, though neither needed it.

Two additional detainees are charged with defrauding a California labor union out of health care money, and a final person is accused of forging immigration-related medical documents.

The Trump administration enjoys singling out California when discussing nationwide fraud, frequently equating the alleged fraud with its Democrat leadership, personified by Governor Gavin Newsom (notably not a fan of the president).

Newsom, for his part, signed a law in 2021 that paused new hospice licenses over fraud concerns. He said his state has been cracking down on hospice fraud ever since, rescinding over 280 hospice licenses in two years and investigating 300 further medical centers.

“Glad the federal government is finally stepping up to do their part,” Newsom wrote on X.

Trump has made tackling Social Security and Medicare fraud a focus of his administration, which is great in theory. But the government has not produced many notable results yet, and we are yet to see whether the allegations into these eight Californians will hold up in a legal sense. Trump’s Department of Justice has had an incredible capacity to lie and face-plant in court, perhaps more so than any former iteration of the department.

And of course, the great irony is that there are many instances of massive, provable fraud taking place in Trump’s own Cabinet. The president also likes to pardon and drop investigations into convicted fraudsters who have pledged fealty to him.

James Fishback—the right-wing Groyper currently sitting near the bottom of Florida’s list of GOP gubernatorial candidates—told a Black man he should be “lynched” when asked about allegations he dated an underage girl.

“So Mr. Fishback, what’s with you smashing a 16- or 17-year-old, can you answer about what’s going on with that?” influencer Tajy TV asked Fishback at an event, surrounded by a crowd of supporters, camera in hand.

“What are you talking about?” Fishback responded.

Tajy TV then goes on to reference allegations that Fishback had a romantic relationship with Keinah Fort in 2022, when she was 17 and he was 27. Fishback called the allegations “completely false.”

Tajy TV then moved on to graphically describing Fishback and Fort having sex, setting Fishback and the crowd off. “Why haven’t I been arrested?” Fishback said, not exactly denying the accusations. “You should be lynched. You should be lynched for talking about me like that.”

“I should be lynched?” said Tajy TV.

“Yes, you should be lynched.”

Then Tajy yelled to “lynch all pedophiles,” which Fishback awkwardly agreed with. This brain-dead interaction is just one of Fishback’s many instances of using this shock-and-awe bigotry to try to build momentum among the Nick Fuentes–adjacent crowd. He has frequently used George Floyd as a meme, called GOP front-runner Byron Donalds (who is also Black) “Byrone,” and made tongue-in-cheek references to Italian fascist Benito Mussolini. Disgusting comments like this are all Fishback really has going for him.

Iranian officials are trolling President Donald Trump’s abysmal leadership amid an ongoing search for the pilot of a U.S. F-15 fighter jet that was shot down over Iran.

Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf took the opportunity Friday to mock the United States for repeatedly declaring victory on its ever-vacillating set of objectives.

“After defeating Iran 37 times in a row, this brilliant no-strategy war they started has now been downgraded from ‘regime change’ to ‘Hey! Can anyone find our pilots? Please?’” Ghalibaf wrote on X. “Wow. What incredible progress. Absolute geniuses.”

The Iranian Embassy in South Africa also posted a joke about MAGA’s successful “regime change,” including photographs of U.S. military leadership who had been ousted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—most recently Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, who was told to step down on Thursday.

Online, Iranian officials in the government and Revolutionary Guard have engaged in an ongoing meme war against the White House.

A pro-Iran account called Explosive News has started posting AI-generated cartoons in the style of Legos to mock Hegseth’s reckless war in Iran and communicate a crude solidarity with the victims of Western aggression. One of the videos posted Thursday attacked Hegseth as a “punk ass rapist bitch,” adding, “Think you a crusader? Nah you just a drunk infidel in a fake uniform.”

Explosive Media shared an AI-generated image Friday of a Lego pilot being chased by Iranian military officers.

“Our team announces that anyone who captures the pilot alive will have their own LEGO-style character made in their honor,” the account wrote in a subsequent post.

The Trump administration is asking Congress for $152 million to transform Alcatraz into a “state-of-the-art secure prison facility,” as part of its 2027 budget proposal.

That would cover just the first-year costs of the redevelopment, which has been roundly criticized as ill conceived and a poor use of federal funds.

“For years, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has housed violent criminals in crumbling detention facilities,” reads the budget item. “Building on a $5 billion investment secured in the President’s [Working Families Tax Cut], the Budget further invests in BOP to ensure competitive pay, safe working conditions, and an end to longstanding correctional officer shortages. Within this level, the Budget also affirms the President’s commitment to rebuild Alcatraz as a state-of-the-art secure prison facility, providing $152 million to cover the first year of project costs.”

Donald Trump has seriously floated the possibility for almost a year, and members of his administration—such as former Attorney General Pam Bondi—have claimed that the site could be used to offload pressure from America’s existing prison network, potentially holding the likes of international drug traffickers.

The biggest problem with that plan: Alcatraz can only hold a maximum of 336 prisoners.

Yet several Republicans have already thrown their support behind the initiative, effectively lending credence to the idea that taxpayer funds should actually be used to rehabilitate the island prison. Immediately after Trump initially pitched the idea in May, Senator Eric Schmitt vaunted the plan as “very smart.” Markwayne Mullin, the Oklahoma senator recently turned homeland security secretary, also endorsed the scheme on X.

Representative Mary E. Miller even got to work itemizing a fantasy list of the most important Alcatraz inductees: “The first person to be sent to Alcatraz should be Anthony Fauci,” she wrote in May, referring to the pandemic-era director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In reality, there is practically zero possibility that the famed prison would reopen to house more prisoners. Alcatraz—which operated for just 29 years—was shut down in 1963 in part due to how expensive it was to operate. Data from the federal Bureau of Prisons shows that housing inmates at Alcatraz was three times more expensive than at other jails thanks to the fact that it is located on a remote island, requiring all of its resources, such as water, food, and fuel, to be shipped from the mainland.

“An estimated $3-5 million was needed just for restoration and maintenance work to keep the prison open. That figure did not include daily operating costs,” according to the Bureau of Prisons.

John Martini, an expert on Alcatraz’s history who previously served as an Alcatraz park ranger, told the San Francisco Chronicle in May that the building is “totally inoperable” and has no running water or sewage.

“It was falling apart and needed huge amounts of reconstruction, and that would have only brought it up to 1963 code,” Martini told the paper, noting that the building would need to be torn down and completely rebuilt to house prisoners again. “It was always an extremely expensive place to run.”

Meanwhile, the tourism centering around the former island prison rakes in $60 million in annual revenue. The site hosts 1.6 million annual visitors, according to the National Park Service.

Trump’s attachment to the penitentiary appears to be less practical than it is uncharacteristically romantic. The president has practically waxed poetic about Alcatraz, sentimentalizing it as representing something that’s “both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable.”

Meanwhile, the White House has proposed sweeping cuts to programs that actually would help Americans, such as slashing $5 billion from the National Institute of Health and $4 billion from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, as well as gutting funding to Planned Parenthood and poverty-alleviating community block grants (which the mock budget derogatorily refers to as a “duplicative slush fund for woke Community Action Agencies”).

The Trump administration officially sent Congress its 2027 budget proposal on Friday, and while the largest story that emerged from the mammoth document was that the president is looking to increase defense spending over 40 percent to a staggering $1.5 trillion, there are plenty more budget adjustments to laugh/shudder/weep over.

Among the social and health programs Trump is looking to cut in order to fund his bloodlust is the National Institutes of Health, the government’s main medical research branch. NIH was one of the main targets of DOGE cuts back in 2025; now Trump’s budget proposal looks to wrest $5 billion more from the department, alleging that NIH “broke the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.”

The NIH has made major breakthroughs in the fields of vaccines, heart disease, and AIDS, and to date 174 researchers funded by the agency have won Nobel Prizes. But because of its willingness to fund research into LGBTQ and minority health, and its unwillingness to break with science to back MAGA’s most ridiculous medical claims, the agency has become a bugbear of the president.

Among the examples the Trump administration cites for its claim that the NIH is “wasteful and radical” are studies on how HIV risk affects the mental and sexual health of young men, and how sexually transmitted infections can occur between transgender women.

Reasoning for the cuts gets downright conspiratorial when the document begins rambling about NIH “funneling millions of dollars to EcoHealth Alliance, which funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic, under Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

Studies conducted from both within and outside the NIH have looked into the “lab-leak theory” and found that while the Chinese government has been less than transparent about sharing genome data from the earliest contractors of Covid, there is little credible evidence supporting the idea that Chinese scientists accidentally created the virus, and that it is more likely Covid emerged from general contact between animals and humans.

“The weight of available evidence … suggests zoonotic spillover … either directly from bats or through an intermediate host,” the WHO concluded last year.

That hasn’t stopped the White House from running with the more inflammatory theory since the end of Trump’s first term, using it to justify racism against Chinese Americans and lend legitimacy to other unfounded conspiracies (cough, Chinese election fraud, cough).

Congress still holds the power of the purse, and tweaks to Trump’s budget proposal are undoubtedly coming. The bad news is that Republicans still command majorities in the House and the Senate, and will aim to pass the 2027 budget before the midterms, which look increasingly favorable for many Democrat challengers. Anything could happen, but for now, it’s looking grim for America’s premier medical research department.