It would be an overstatement to suggest that Minnesota’s aid fraud story is baseless. It’s not. Several years ago, federal prosecutors in the Biden Justice Department uncovered evidence of wrongdoing, and dozens of suspects, including some Somali Americans, were charged.
It was not, however, much of a national story. Minnesotans learned of the controversy ahead of the 2022 elections; Democrats, including Gov. Tim Walz, fared well anyway; and when Republicans tried to generate interest in the controversy when the governor was nominated for vice president, it went largely overlooked.
In recent months, however, the right has breathed new light into the story — Paul Waldman recently made the case in an MS NOW piece that it fit nicely into Donald Trump’s desire “to foment racist and anti-immigrant hatred” — and the right’s propaganda machine turned up the volume to an astonishing degree, telling conservative voters that this 2022 controversy was a pressing and ongoing national scandal.
The drumbeat grew so loud that Walz, who was well on his way to winning a third term in the fall, announced that he’s no longer running for reelection.
Soon after the governor announced his decision, the president celebrated the news online — while suggesting that Walz’s exit wouldn’t be sufficient. Trump’s missive read:
Minnesota’s Corrupt Governor will possibly leave office before his Term is up but, in any event, will not be running again because he was caught, REDHANDED, along with Ilhan Omar, and others of his Somali friends, stealing Tens of Billions of Taxpayer Dollars. I feel certain the facts will come out, and they will reveal a seriously unscrupulous, and rich, group of ‘SLIMEBALLS.’ Governor Walz has destroyed the State of Minnesota, but others, like Governor Gavin Newscum, JB Pritzker, and Kathy Hochul, have done, in my opinion, an even more dishonest and incompetent job. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW!
There’s no point in fact-checking every individual error of fact and judgment in Trump’s ridiculous rant — suffice to say, the lie-to-claim ratio was roughly one-to-one — though it is worth emphasizing that no evidence has emerged to suggest Walz engaged in any corruption whatsoever.
What’s more, let’s not forget the president has been amplifying unusually ugly conspiracy theories about Minnesota quite a bit of late, despite numerous appeals that he act with basic human decency.
But looking ahead, the key element worth watching is how, exactly, the administration intends to target the Democratic governor moving forward. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, for example, told Fox News on Monday night that the president “believes that Gov. Walz is criminally liable, and I think the Department of Justice is going to find out.” In other words, as far as the White House is concerned, Walz’s departure from the 2026 race was the first step, not the last, in its larger partisan crusade. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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