Protecting Taxpayers? What a Joke

As JD Vance runs interference in Maine, his epically corrupt boss laughs all the way to the bank

They agreed to hold the signs, but do they really believe this scam? (Photo by Pool via Getty Images)

Gosh, JD Vance was so right. “The American people are done being taken for a ride,” he told a crowd at Maine’s Bangor International Airport yesterday. “It’s time for the Maine people and the Maine taxpayer to be put front and center.”

Oh, wait.

He wasn’t talking about his boss plotting the country’s biggest heist ever by paying himself $10 billion in a lawsuit he filed against the IRS (and now may settle reportedly for $1.7 billion of taxpayers’ money to hand out to Trump allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration)?

My mistake.

He wasn’t describing American taxpayers being taken for a ride as his boss is looking to his Republican enablers in Congress to pay $1 billion for his golden ballroom—that ballroom he previously claimed his private donors were paying for?

Nope.

He surely wasn’t talking about Jared Kushner, installed as a faux diplomat by his father-in-law, hitting up Middle East states for $5 billion or more while ostensibly negotiating an end to the war in Iran, which we taxpayers are funding at a rate of about a billion a day.

He also wasn’t referencing the push by Trump’s Pentagon to increase the defense budget by more than 40 percent to $1.5 trillion, another scam to keep waging an unauthorized, unsupported disaster of a war and ready our troops to attack whatever country excites his deranged boss’s angry whims next.

No, JD Vance had the nerve to stand on a rally stage surrounded by signs that read “Protecting Taxpayer Dollars” and say this: “Because you all work hard, because you all pay your taxes, because you do things the right way, it is time to have leadership in Washington that treats you the right way and protects those hard-earned tax dollars.”

And this: “For once, for the first time in a very long time, you’ve got an administration in Washington, D.C. that is fighting for you, fighting to protect your tax dollars and fighting to put the fraudsters in prison, which is where they belong.”

I mean, I want that. Don’t you?

Did this mean he was going to take his boss into custody for stealing from American taxpayers?

Just kidding.

“When the president of the United States said ‘JD, we’ve got a fraud problem and I want you to tackle it, I was so proud and so happy to be able to do it,” Vance said.

Clearly, JD’s boss—the head of the most corrupt administration in U.S. history— wasn’t asking him to turn him in. He was looking for someone and something else to distract American taxpayers from his own epic corruption.

So what did JD do? He took out the regime’s favorite playbook: Target immigrants! Make them the scapegoats!

“If you look at the illegal immigrant communities who have taken benefits that ought by rights to go to the people in this room,” he said, “what you have in Maine is a festering problem where people have been taken advantage of and they’ve been stolen from.”

This came the day after Vance announced that the Trump regime is withholding $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments from California and threatened to do the same in every state if they fail to prosecute Medicaid fraud.

“There are California taxpayers and American taxpayers who are being defrauded because California isn’t taking its program seriously, but also you have people who have been prescribed medications that they don’t even need,” Vance said at the White House. “They’ve had drugs put into their bodies that they don’t need because fraudsters have actually encouraged false prescriptions and false administration of medications.”

I don’t doubt there is Medicaid fraud and there are serious taxpayer dollars being squandered. But this is the same campaign against Somali immigrant fraud that led to Trump’s masked goons killing people in the streets of Minneapolis.

These are the same people who demonized Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio and lied that they were eating cats and dogs. These are the same people who are always on the lookout to strip federal dollars from blue states to fulfill their promised retribution against Democrats. (This is also the same regime that cut an estimated $1 trillion in Medicaid funding over the next decade in its big, ugly bill last year.)

An ethical administration pursuing fraud would be an honorable enterprise. Trump and his bunch pursuing fraud to “protect taxpayers”? Give me a break. It’s like thieves rolling up to Fort Knox or commandeering a loaded Brinks truck and pointing to a kid nearby stealing another kid’s lunch money.

JD Vance rolling into town and boasting about his anti-fraud campaign makes makes me think about the Bob Dylan lines from his 1983 album, Infidels:

They say that patriotism is the last refuge

To which a scoundrel clings

Steal a little and they throw you in jail

Steal a lot and they make you king

The midterm elections are about breaking the power of Donald Trump and his criminal racket, including demanding the release of the millions of Epstein files that they continue to illegally cover up on behalf of Trump and other rich and powerful men. They’re also about beginning to hold the regime’s many criminals accountable and confronting the lies about the economic and human cost caused by Trump’s reckless failure in Iran and the Middle East.

But this latest charade of the pompous Vance has the rotten odor of hypocrisy. It’s hard to overstate the sickening level of self-denial required to stand in front of a crowd of actual taxpayers and claim he and Trump are “protecting taxpayer dollars.”

It takes a gravely ruined person to feel patriotic fervor toward these scoundrels. As Samuel Johnson originally put it back in 1775, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

Please add this latest con job to the reasons why we need to ensure massive voter turnout for the November midterms—171 days from today. This grotesque and unchecked abuse of power cannot go on endlessly.

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