LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
February 26, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson
Feb 27, 2026
It appears the State of the Union was the marker for the White House to launch directly into campaign mode. Much of that mode centers on trying to defang Trump’s weaknesses with attacks on Democrats. And since the 2024 campaign brought us the insistence from the Trump campaign, including Trump and then–vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, that “they’re eating the dogs…they’re eating the cats,” it’s reasonable to assume the next several months are going to be a morass of lies and disinformation.
Trump announced in his State of the Union that he was declaring a “war on fraud to be led by our great Vice President J.D. Vance” and said that “members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer…in actuality, the number is much higher than that. And California, Massachusetts, Maine and many other states are even worse.” He added: “And we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight.”
This, in part, seemed designed to reverse victim and offender by suggesting that rather than Trump’s being the perpetrator of extraordinary frauds and corruption in cryptocurrency, for example—he was, after all, found guilty on 34 charges of business fraud in 2024—immigrants are to blame for fraud.
As Kirsten Swanson and Ryan Raiche of KSTP in Minneapolis explain, members of Minnesota’s Somali community, 95% of whom are U.S. citizens, pay about $67 million in taxes annually and have an estimated $8 billion impact on the community. While some have indeed been charged and convicted of fraud over the past five years, the accusation of $19 billion in fraud is just a number thrown out without evidence by “then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson,” who estimated in December 2025 that “‘half or more’ of $18 billion in Medicaid reimbursements from 14 high-risk programs could be fraudulent.”
Yesterday Vance and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who oversees Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for low-income households, announced the administration is withholding $259 million in Medicaid funds from Minnesota, claiming the state has not done enough to protect taxpayers from fraud. It is illegal for the executive branch to withhold funds appropriated by Congress, and a federal judge has blocked a similar freeze on $10 billion in childcare funding for Illinois, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York while the case is in court. Nonetheless, Minnesota representative Tom Emmer, who is part of the Republican leadership in the House, approved the attack on his constituents, posting: “The war on fraud has begun. And Somali fraudsters in my home state are about to find out.”
Minnesota governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, posted: “This has nothing to do with fraud…. This is a campaign of retribution. Trump is weaponizing the entirety of the federal government to punish blue states like Minnesota. These cuts will be devastating for veterans, families with young kids, folks with disabilities, and working people across our state.”
While Walz is almost certainly correct that this is a campaign of retribution, the administration is also salting into the media an explanation for the sudden depletion of the trust funds that are used to pay Medicare and Social Security.
In March 2025, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the trust fund that pays for Medicare A would be solvent until 2052. On Monday, it updated its projections, saying the funds will run out in 2040. The CBO also expects the Social Security trust fund to run dry a year earlier than previously expected, by the end of 2031. As Nick Lichtenberg of Fortune wrote, policy changes by the Republicans under Trump, especially the tax cuts in the budget reconciliation bill the Republicans call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” have “drastically shortened the financial life spans of both Medicare and Social Security, accelerating their paths toward insolvency.”
Between Trump’s statement that if the administration finds enough fraud it can balance the budget overnight, and the subsequent insistence that cuts to Medicaid are necessary because of that fraud, it sure looks like the administration is trying to distract attention from the CBO’s report that Trump’s tax cuts have cut the solvency of Social Security and Medicare by more than a decade. Instead, they are hoping to convince voters that immigrants are at fault.
Similarly, in an oldie but a goodie, Republicans today hauled former secretary of state Hillary Clinton before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to testify by video about her knowledge of the investigations into sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. In a scathing opening statement, Clinton noted that while committee chair James Comer (R-KY) subpoenaed eight law enforcement officials who were directly involved in that investigation, only one appeared before the committee. The rest simply submitted brief statements saying they had no information. Clinton also noted that the committee has held no public hearings and refused media coverage of hearings—including today’s—and has made little effort to hear from the people whose names are prominent in the files. When the committee heard from billionaire businessman Les Wexner last week, she observed, “not a single Republican Member showed up.”
And yet Clinton was before them, despite her sworn declaration on January 13 that “I had no idea about their criminal activities. I do not recall ever encountering Mr. Epstein. I never flew on his plane or visited his island, homes or offices. I have nothing else to add to that.”
She did, though, note that she has advocated tirelessly for women and girls, including advocacy for the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which her husband, President Bill Clinton, signed into law. The Trump administration has fired more than 70% of the career civil servants at the State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Office.
Secretary Clinton called out the committee for compelling her “to testify, fully aware that I have no knowledge that would assist your investigation, in order to distract attention from President Trump’s actions and to cover them up despite legitimate calls for answers.” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) confirmed Clinton’s accusation when she shared a photo from the closed deposition with right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson, who posted it on social media with the caption: “This is the first time Hillary has had to answer real questions about Epstein. Clinton does not look happy.”
Yesterday, a spokesperson for Harvard said former Treasury secretary and former president of Harvard University Lawrence Summers has resigned from Harvard effective at the end of the semester because of his ties to Epstein. Today, the president and chief executive officer of the World Economic Forum, Børge Brende, stepped down after the organization reviewed his connections with Epstein. Brende was a former Norwegian minister of foreign affairs.
On Tuesday morning, Stephen Fowler of NPR built on earlier reporting by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger to report that the Department of Justice (DOJ) appears to have illegally withheld material from the Epstein files. That material is related to allegations that Trump sexually assaulted two girls when they were about thirteen years old. The DOJ also removed from the files they did publish documents that mention Trump among allegations against convicted sexual abuser Epstein.
When Fowler asked the White House about the missing documents, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told him that Trump “has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”
Fowler notes that on February 14, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress that they had not withheld or redacted any records “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.” The Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the DOJ to release all the files no later than December 19, 2025, prohibits that type of redactions, permitting them only to protect Epstein’s victims and survivors.
After NPR reported the story, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Robert Garcia of California, released a statement, saying: “Yesterday, I reviewed unredacted evidence logs at the Department of Justice. Oversight Democrats can confirm that the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor who accused President Trump of heinous crimes.”
Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder wrote yesterday that Trump is “failing at fascism” because “he needs a bloody, popular, victorious war” as an opportunity to “to kill one’s own people and thereby generate a reservoir of meaning that could be used to justify indefinite rule and further oppression, to make the world seem like an endless [struggle] and submission to hierarchy as the only kind of life.”
On this morning’s cable news shows, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice pointed out, Republicans were “[s]uddenly talking again about the need to ‘take’ Greenland,” “[h]yping [the] importance of ‘strangling’ the Cuban government,” and “[e]ncouraging Trump to ‘topple’ [the] Iranian regime.”
But there, too, ginning up a war would give foreign affairs coverage to another scandal: On Monday, Steve Holland and Alexandra Alper of Reuters reported that China’s AI startup DeepSeek has been trained on Nvidia’s most advanced chip. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted that an official from the United Arab Emirates invested $500,000,000 to buy 49% of the stock of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency company shortly before Trump took office, putting $187 million directly into the pockets of the Trump family. Under Biden, U.S. officials had refused to sell Nvidia chips to the UAE out of concerns they would end up in the hands of China for use in munitions.
Hannah Knowles and Natalie Allison of the Washington Post reported today that Republicans were hoping to trap the Democrats at the State of the Union by demanding they stand to demonstrate their agreement that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” Democrats, who are demanding reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, did not take the bait and stayed in their seats. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has tried to pump up the story, and the Trump War Room wrote: “Remember this when you head to the polls in 2026, 2028, and beyond.”
But the timing of the Republicans’ story coincided with the horrific story that on February 19, Border Patrol agents had dropped Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind legal refugee from genocide in Myanmar who spoke no English and could not read, write, or use electronic devices, miles from his home in Buffalo, New York. They did not notify either his lawyer or his family that he had been dropped off, and when his family filed a missing persons case, the police believed Shah Alam was with Border Patrol and closed the file. He was found dead on the street on February 24.
A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, said: “Border Patrol agents offered him a courtesy ride, which he chose to accept to a coffee shop, determined to be a warm, safe location near his last known address, rather than be released directly from the Border Patrol station. He showed no signs of distress, mobility issues or disabilities requiring special assistance.”
In his State of the Union address, Trump also turned back to his attacks on the rights of transgender Americans, and right on cue, a new law went into effect today in Kansas that invalidates the driver’s licenses of transgender residents by requiring that identification must match the holder’s “sex at birth.” The bill, SB 244, also requires transgender people to use bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their sex at birth, making any governmental entity that violates that law liable for penalties of $125,000 per violation, and allows citizens to sue any transgender people they encounter in bathrooms for $1,000 in damages.
Erin Reed of Erin in the Morning explains that the legislature passed the law without its vetting by a committee. When the Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, vetoed the measure, the legislature overrode her veto to make the bill a law. The legislators left no grace period before licenses became invalid, and a letter sent to those affected reminded them that “you may be subject to additional penalties if you are operating a vehicle without a valid credential.” Reed notes that in Kansas, driving without a license is punishable by a $1,000 fine and six months in jail, although first offenders typically are cited and fined. Reed notes that the Trump administration is leading a campaign to strip transgender Americans of accurate identification documents.
Today, Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post reported that right-wing activists are circulating a draft of an executive order that declares a national emergency to give Trump control over voting. The activists say that they are working with the White House. The order reiterates a debunked claim that China interfered in the 2020 presidential election and says the president can ban mail-in ballots and voting machines.
Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket called the plan “blatantly illegal” and unconstitutional. The U.S. Constitution gives sole control of elections to the states, not the president.
The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark R. Warner of Virginia, refuted the idea that there is a national emergency. “We’ve been raising the alarm for weeks about President Trump’s attacks on our elections and now we’re seeing reports that outline how they may be planning to do it. This is a plot to interfere with the will of voters and undermine both the rule of law and public confidence in our elections.”
And so, election season is underway.
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
