TRUMP IS JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG

As 2026 begins, I know I'm supposed to be pleased that President Trump's poll numbers are bad and Democrats have been winning off-year elections by large margins. That's all good -- but it's not enough.

Republicans are on offense. Republicans are always on offense, no matter how unpopular they are. They've made fraud in Minnesota a national news story, and now Trump, not content with feeezing federal aid to daycare centers in Minnesota, is doing it nationwide. He and his administration hope that people in the other 49 states will blame Tim Walz and Somalis in Minnesota for this, rather than the president himself for imposing collective punishment. This might backfire, but it might not. (Maybe some Democrats should start using the phrase "collective punishment," or a more Instagram-friendly synonym, in order to direct the outrage where it belongs.)

I know that most people think the Republican Party is a personality cult led by a man who's experiencing age-related decline and alienating millions of voters. But the Republican Party is more than just Trump. In this story, he's following the lead of younger Republicans.

Please pay attention to the timeline:

On November 21, Trump announced on his Truth Social platform that he was “immediately” terminating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somali immigrants in Minnesota.... About 705 Somalis are on that programme.

Without providing evidence, Trump claimed that “Somali gangs are terrorising the people of that great State” and accused Governor Walz, without proof, of overseeing a state that had become a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity”....

Trump’s accusations about the Somali community come after a conservative activist, Christopher Rufo, published allegations of welfare fraud against Somalis in Minnesota in a magazine called City Journal on November 19.

Rufo was actually a co-author of this piece, with Ryan Thorpe. A story in The Minnesota Star Tribune makes clear that there's no real evidence for Thorpe and Rufo's most explosive allegation: that money from aid programs was funneled to the terrorist group al-Shabab. But the story got around, and Trump joined in the effort to make it go national, an effort he didn't initiate. Trump is often a follower rather than a leader in GOP propaganda campaigns, and Rufo is often a leader. Trump wasn't talking about DEI or "transgender for everybody," as he likes to put it, until Rufo and the GOP propaganda machine put those subjects on the national agenda.

Eventually the Minnesota story was catapulted further by a GOP-propagandist video maker named Nick Shirley. Again, Trump didn't lead -- he followed.

You'll argue that none of this could break through without Trump's ability to command the attention of his cult. My response is that a similar propaganda campaign brought down the liberal group ACORN in 2009. Who was the cult leader of the GOP then? Did the GOP even have a leader?

In a Bluesky thread, Dave Weigel reminds us of that this is an old story and shouldn't be a national scandal:

In 2022, the Biden DOJ filed the first charges against dozens of fraudsters, many of them Somali-American, who'd fleeced a state food aid program.

This happened right as early voting began in state elections; voters re-elected Gov. Walz and gave Democrats a trifecta. It was a damaging scandal, but hardly covered up. Rs whacked at it when Walz became VP nominee, but it didn't become a decisive issue.

Fast-forward to now, and to that video:

Conservative influencer Nick Shirley ... goes to one dodgy-looking daycare (the sign on the front misspells "learning") and films panicky employees who won't let them in. He promotes this as having personally uncovered $100 million of fraud.

The WH, House GOP, Elon etc circulate the video, often thanking Shirley for finally doing the work the media and Democrats refused to do. Video gets 100m+ views.

... step back and look at the machinery and you see how sturdy this media/WH infrastructure is. If they want to make a humiliating Democratic scandal the biggest story in the country, they can do it.

It doesn't matter that the fraud was being probed. It doesn't matter that the federal investigation of this fraud started in 2021, the year Joe Biden became president. Republicans have a propaganda machine that can mold the truth, one that doesn't rely on Trump. When Republicans think they have a good story, everyone in the party works together.

We should keep trying to weaken Trump, and hope he continues to damage himself. But it's not enough. We need to weaken the GOP messaging apparatus -- or counter it with strong messaging of our own. Otherwise, this will just keep happening forever, no matter how weak Trump becomes or how well Democrats do in elections.