What did Donald Trump do today?

He once again threatened to withhold medical care from poor children to punish the Americans he thinks are his enemies.

The day after Trump gave a long speech that left him visibly exhausted, the White House kept him out of public sight today. But the administration did send JD Vance and Mehmet Oz out to reiterate a threat Trump made last night. The two held a press event today promising to withhold $259 million in Medicaid funds to the state of Minnesota. That state's governor, Tim Walz, was Vance's opponent in the 2024 vice-presidential race. 

Minnesota is also home to the largest Somali-American communities in the nation, a group Trump has compared to animals and falsely accused of disloyalty. It's not clear how much of Trump's loathing of Americans of Somali descent comes from his personal racist beliefs and how much of it is political opportunism in the belief that other Americans can be convinced that those racist beliefs are true. Racist broadsides against immigrants were a major theme of his campaign and a sort of acid test for then-candidate Vance, who was given the job of spreading false rumors that Haitian-American immigrants in Ohio were stealing and eating household pets.

The link to Minnesota and Medicaid has its roots in a fraud investigation launched by the Walz administration before the election. Some of the targets were Somali-Americans, although most were not. That ultimately led to Walz suspending one grant program that had been a particular target for fraud, although legitimate claims were filled through other programs.

Medicaid, which is the federal government's main provider of health insurance for children and poor families, has no such alternative at the state level, meaning that Trump's threatened cuts will directly impact the ability of Minnesotans who have not committed fraud to receive necessary health care. 

There's no way to be sure whether Vance and Oz's delivery of Trump's threat will amount to anything in practice. He's made precisely this same threat before, to no real effect, because courts immediately put a stop to it. As a general rule, Trump has no legal power to punish Americans, especially Americans who are not themselves guilty of any crimes, by arbitrarily denying them government services—and certainly not as a means of political revenge against a state that doesn't vote for him.

Oz, who is Trump's Medicaid administrator, said that people who commit fraud against the program are "self-serving scoundrels." That's hard to disagree with. Among the people who have commited fraud against Medicaid and Medicare who have received pardons or commutations from Trump are:

• Paul Walczak of Florida, who stole employee Medicare payments and used them to buy a yacht, and whose mother later gave Trump's PAC $1 million 

• Joseph Schwartz of New Jersey, who committed fraud against Medicaid as the CEO of a chain of for-profit nursing homes, who paid lobbyists with Trump's ear $1.1 million to get the pardon 

• Lawrence S. Duran and Judith Negron of Florida, who defrauded Medicare of $200 million, and who had earned the longest sentences for health care fraud ever handed down in the United States 

• Rickey Ivan Kanter, who defrauded Medicare through his orthopedic shoe business 

• Paul Behrens, Thaddeus Bereday, Todd S. Farha, William Kale, and Peter Clay of Florida, all executives in a health insurance company that defrauded Medicare 

• Robert Corkern of Mississippi, a hospital management company owner who bribed a public official to overpay for his services, driving up public reimbursement costs 

• William "Ed" Henry, a former Republican member of the Alabama state legislature, who stole government property as part of a Medicare fraud scheme 

• Ted Suhl of Arkansas, who ran a faith-based behavioral therapy clinic, and defrauded Medicaid 

• Philip Esformes of Florida, whose chain of nursing homes billed Medicare $1.3 billion for care it never provided to patients, and who went on to commit other crimes after Trump's clemency 

• Saloman E. Melgen of Florida, an opthalmologist who bilked Medicare for $73 million by performing unnecessary (and sometimes painful and dangerous) eye surgeries 

 

Why does this matter?

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

• Under no circumstances does a president who pardons $1.6 billion in medical fraud, mostly from his own home state, care about medical fraud.