By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, February 27, 2026
In the recent State of the Union, Donald Trump boasted
that no illegal immigrants have entered the United States during the past nine
months. This is, like most of what Donald Trump says, untrue.
There are places all along the border where you can go
first thing in the morning, as I have, and sit in your car nursing a cup of gas
station coffee while watching illegal immigrants enter the United States. Some
of them go straight to the Border Patrol to get arrested and make asylum
claims, and some do not. The Border Patrol arrested about 6,000 at the southern
border in January—but that does not mean that they got them all, which they
almost certainly did not. What the Trump administration apparently meant to say
was that, of the illegals arrested, the Border Patrol did not voluntarily allow
any to proceed into the country, as they sometimes have in the past. But even
that is misleading: Illegals arrested and detained at federal facilities are,
from time to time, released for a variety of reasons: pending asylum claims,
overcrowded lockups, etc.
It simply is not true that there are no new illegal
immigrants entering the United States. There most assuredly are: Some crossing
the border, while others are entering legally and overstaying their visas. Some
of them are Central American construction workers, some of them are aspiring
fashion models working without permits, some of them are Irish bartenders,
and some of them are—whatever. It’s a crowd.
I do not think that the cretins and malefactors who
compose the Trump administration stay up at night worried about questions of
epistemology, but it is worth asking: If it really were the case that there
were absolutely no new illegals coming into the United States—how would we
know?
Trump’s incoherent State of the Union address on Tuesday
featured his usual stroke-victim diction and his patented blend of stupidity
and dishonesty. Fact-checking his claims is laborious, because he speaks almost
exclusively in simpleton’s superlatives, and it also is pointless, inasmuch as
the people who most need to know the facts are not much inclined to listen to
them, being, as they are, members of an especially tawdry and shameful cult.
Suffice it to say that inflation was not at record levels when Trump assumed
office this time around, and it is not plummeting today—it was high when he
came in and remains elevated. Foreign direct investment in the United States is
in fact down, not soaring by trillions of dollars. There is no such thing as a
“second lady,” with apologies to Usha Vance, who probably could have married a
doctor. Some of the speech could have used some context: I admire Michael Dell
and his generosity, and it is true that he made computers in his dorm room at
the University of Texas—but mainly he has made them in China, a fact of
corporate history that ought to be of some interest to the Trump gang.
The competition is considerable, but it may be that the
dumbest and most dishonest claim of the night was that J.D. Vance’s newly
announced fraud commission will, if it does its job, produce a “balanced budget
overnight.” Vance is as contemptible a specimen as American public life
currently has to offer, but he is relatively new to the cult game, and he has
here foolishly taken on a high-profile task that can be evaluated quantitatively.
The projected deficit for 2026 is $1.9 trillion on its way toward more
than $3 trillion per annum over the coming decade. For scale, this year’s
projected deficit will amount to about
5.8 percent of GDP. Which is to say, to balance the budget by means of
fraud prevention, fraud in federal programs would have to amount to an industry
right
around five times the combined global size of all those AI-enabling data
centers we hear so much about.
Good luck with that.
I, for one, will be very surprised if the annual deficit
or the projected 10-year deficit is $1 smaller when Trump leaves office than it
is today. Rising spending is a good bet (ask
that guy who bet his life savings against DOGE) and so are rising deficits.
If Vance manages to balance the budget by means of policing fraud, then I will
eat my favorite J.W. Brooks hat and post the video on The Dispatch for
your entertainment.
But I am confident that millinery work is safe.
Like the administration’s immigration claims, its fiscal
claims are preposterous—obviously so, if you take a second to think
about them.
The administration’s current strategy for policing
Medicaid fraud (which is a real thing) in Minnesota is withholding some federal
reimbursement payments, amounting to $259 million—not billion,
certainly not trillion. That’s back-office monkey business, not a fraud
investigation. If you have good reason to believe that you have, say, $1
billion worth of Medicaid fraud, then what you need to have next is a federal
fraud indictment and a trial in which $1 billion worth of Medicaid fraud is
documented in the course of putting the fraudsters in prison for a long time.
That, and not political showmanship, is how you do the actual work of policing
fraud.
There have been fraud prosecutions and there will be
more—as there should be—but the dollar numbers involved do not amount even to a
rounding error on the federal deficit: We are right now talking about cases
involving millions, not billions or trillions of dollars.
Perhaps they will add up to a few billion. We are not balancing the budget on a
few billion dollars, or a few hundred billion—and the balanced budget is
Trump’s stated metric of success, not mine.
Undertaking those fraud investigations and prosecutions
is hard and generally thankless work, which is one of the reasons the feds do
not do as much of it as they should. But the Trump administration can, without
very much effort, inflict economic damage on Democrat-leaning states such as
Minnesota and California while forgoing the hard work of investigating and
prosecuting most of the alleged fraud, at least some of which is imaginary. If
we are to be so cruel as to pretend that J.D. Vance is numbskull enough to
believe the baloney that comes out of his own mouth or Trump’s, then we should
have fraud cases amounting to just about 5.8 percent of GDP, give or take. The
notion is, of course, absurd.
But, then, so is the fact that Donald Trump is president
of these United States.
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