What did Donald Trump do today?

He used illegal Medicaid cuts to punish his political opponents in two blue states.

The Trump administration announced today that it was "pausing" Medicaid disbursements to Minnesota and California, over supposed fraud. The governors of each of those states are both political rivals to Trump: Gavin Newsom of California is a likely Democratic presidential candidate in 2028, and Minnesota's Tim Walz was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2024.

Trump has made this threat before: in February, he said he'd withhold $259 million from Minnesota. He never carried it out, though. Courts have stopped Trump from politically motivated interference with healthcare programs before. In spite of the attention that Trump's HHS officials—former lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and daytime talk show host Mehmet Oz—tried to bring to the move today, it's not clear that any money has been withheld yet.

There is Medicare fraud in Minnesota and California—and in every other state, and probably almost every individual county. Committing fraud against the government for these kinds of programs is easy, but getting away with it is more difficult—as Trump, whose business was convicted of defrauding the State of New York, is well aware. (That is not to be confused with Trump's criminal conviction on 34 felony charges, which dealt with different matters.) Even if he didn't have personal experience with it, Trump has pardoned many wealthy and politically connected Medicare and Medicaid fraudsters, who collectively stole billions of dollars.

Regardless, Trump has no authority to withhold Medicaid funding for any state, or impose conditions on its release outside of what the law permits. Doing so violates Congress's constitutionally granted control over appropriation, as well as the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.

Trump has made little secret of his intention to punish states that don't support him politically at the federal level—even though, to use California as an example, that means punishing millions of people who voted for him. He's also effectively stopped approving disaster relief for blue states in his second term.

 

Why does this matter?

• Cutting off basic government services to punish areas the leader thinks aren't sufficiently loyal to him is what dictators do. 

• It's beyond evil to punish poor children by withholding medical care to score political points against Americans who politically oppose you. 

• Presidents who care about fraud generally commit less of it.