Just like the Trump administration lies about our elections in order to justify stealing them, they are lying about SNAP recipients in order to justify starving them.
On Thursday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins pulled out the old “welfare queen” trope about struggling Americans receiving benefits. For extra MAGA points, she suggested fraud is worse in blue states.
“What we have found in those states that have more guardrails than Minnesota or New York or California – a couple hundred thousand dead people, half a million people getting more than one benefit – I mean, people driving luxury cars,” she told Fox Business viewers.
I noticed she did not use the word “fraud,” although Fox producers did that for her in a full-screen graphic. The truth is, as Civil Eats explains in great detail, the amount of household-related SNAP fraud is minuscule. The system “already has extensive fraud prevention and quality control in place,” it reported. Not only that, the site points out there is a difference between payment errors, which are usually unintentional mistakes, and fraud.
This is not the first time Rollins has spilled her vicious lie about luxury cars. Civil Eats noted that “On Fox [Business] in April, she said that 14,000 SNAP recipients were driving luxury vehicles, like Ferraris and Teslas, in just one state.” Yet she doesn’t seem to have provided a single photograph to the Fox producers in either appearance. You know they would have been happy to share them if she had. Nor could I find any such evidence on the official USDA website.
But John Amato caught Republican Congressman Mark Alford repeating the same lie on a right-wing podcast, in June.
Meanwhile, a growing number of Americans are going hungry, much of it thanks to Trumpflation.
And Brooke? As one of the people actually paying taxes so your billionaire pals don’t have to (and Trump’s AG buddy has a scheme allowing him to forever cheat on them), I’d much rather my money go to food for an “undeserving” family than President Peace Prize’s misbegotten war against Iran. Or for your salary, for that matter.
