Donald Trump has ordered his vice president to target Democrat-led states as he leads a new nationwide anti-fraud task force.
“Vice President JD Vance is now in charge of ‘FRAUD’ in the United States,” the president announced in a Truth Social blast early Friday morning. “His focus will be ‘EVERYWHERE,’ but primarily in those Blue States where CROOKED DEMOCRAT POLITICIANS, like those in California, Illinois, Minnesota (Somalia beware!), Maine, New York, and many others, have had a “free for all” in the unprecedented theft of Taxpayer Money.”
Trump himself is the only convicted felon in U.S. history to have assumed the office of president after being found guilty in 2024 of falsifying business records over hush-money payments to an adult film star. A court also found him liable in a sweeping New York civil fraud case for inflating the value of his properties and net worth over more than a decade, a finding upheld on appeal in August 2025.
Trump said in his post that “raids have already started in Los Angeles,” apparently referring to the suspension of over 200 healthcare providers and hospices in California’s largest city in an FBI-led anti-fraud blitz which included a number of arrests. Fox News reported that the operation was carried out in “coordination” with Vance’s “Task Force to Eliminate Fraud.”
Friday’s announcement now ties a bow on what Trump had teased during his State of the Union address earlier in February, when the fraudster president declared a “war on fraud, to be led by our great Vice President, JD Vance.”
MAGA’s concerns over the scourge of fraud have been directed less at the president’s known propensity for deceptive business practices than toward Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future scandal, a pandemic-era scheme involving the theft of federal child nutrition funds.
The Biden administration opened an investigation into the fraud in 2022, which resulted in 78 individuals being charged. The second Trump administration has since claimed credit for the findings of that probe and is using them as a springboard for a nationwide crackdown aimed almost exclusively at states, like Minnesota, that did not vote for Trump.
His administration has further used the Minnesota fraud cases, in which the majority of defendants are of Somali descent, as a broad pretext for targeting the state’s entire Somali community.
Trump has referred to them as “garbage,” said he doesn’t want them in the country, and called Somalia “not even a nation.” His warning in Friday’s post—“Somalia beware!“—echoed his anti-migrant crackdown in Minnesota earlier this year that resulted in the fatal shooting of two U.S. citizens.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey warned then that “if this were about fraud, then you’d see an invasion perhaps of accountants.” Trump appears to have taken that remark on board, establishing his anti-fraud task force on March 16 during a ceremony at which he made little secret of what appears to be the initiative’s partisan aim.
“It seems that it’s usually in blue states,” he said. “If it’s in a red state, we’re going there too, but it seems that it’s heavily, heavily Democrat.”
Trump had already granted the title of “fraud czar” to Colin McDonald, a veteran federal prosecutor who is now serving as the first-assistant attorney general for national fraud enforcement, a new division of the Justice Department.
Vance, who it seems will instead take on that title as he works on the anti-fraud initiative from inside the White House, is a former venture capitalist with a law degree but no background in auditing, fraud enforcement, or the administration of social insurance programs.
What he does possess, however, is access to the full machinery of the federal government—and a political mandate from his boss to point it at the president’s enemies.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
