Trump Hands Vance a Ticking Time Bomb

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

 

Marco Rubio received a prolonged standing ovation when Donald Trump name-checked him during the State of the Union address. But contrary to the secretary of state’s reputation as a jack of all administrative trades, this time, it was JD Vance whom Trump saddled with a job.

 

“Tonight, I am officially announcing the war on fraud to be led by our great Vice President JD Vance,” the president said following a prolonged riff on the network of largely Somali fraudsters in Minnesota. “This is the kind of corruption that shreds the fabric of a nation, and we are working on it like you wouldn’t believe,” Trump observed. “And we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight. It’ll go very quickly.”

 

Unlikely. Of course, the fraud that became inevitable when lawmakers opened the Treasury’s spigots during the Covid-19 pandemic should not be hard to find. The Government Accountability Office has furnished lawmakers with a roadmap to track down roughly $200 billion lost to theft and $100 billion in misallocated funds. Indeed, even the Minnesota fraudsters accused of embezzling an estimated $9 billion were hiding in plain sight, their misdeeds chronicled for years by intrepid local reporters.

 

However, recovering those funds and identifying perpetrators is the work of prosecutors. But Vance will not find fish big enough to satisfy those who expect, as Trump said, that the “kind of money you’re talking about” is sufficient to “balance our budget.” If that or anything like it is the expectation that will be set for the vice president’s performance, he’ll fail to meet it.

 

Vance’s charge is reminiscent of the jobs Joe Biden outsourced to Kamala Harris — finding the “root causes” of the migration crisis, for example, and uncovering “voter suppression” initiatives at the state level, where federal constitutional officers have limited authority. Superficially, these roles seemed to offer Harris a platform to burnish her brand among the Democratic partisans who invested in the causes she oversaw. But Harris was set up to fail. Vance should be wary of stumbling onto the path Harris followed to political oblivion.

 

“Corruption” will take on a far different political valence if Democrats control one or both chambers of Congress next year. Congressional Democrats are all but guaranteed to chase down claims that the Trump administration’s principals have enriched themselves and abused public funds in the process. Crypto currency investment vehicles, foreign emoluments, pay-to-play allegations, conflicts of interest, suspect pardons, and so on — the subpoenas will fly, and it’s not at all assured that congressional investigators won’t hit pay dirt.

 

Democrats would no doubt love the opportunity to make Vance — still the likeliest of Trump’s possible successors — the face of Trump’s anti-corruption initiatives. If their investigations into the Trump administration’s dealings play out as they expect them to, Democrats will claim that his presidency’s interest in good governance never extended to its own misdeeds. And Vance breezily presided over all of it, closing his eyes to the corruption right under his nose.

 

That’s a lot of baggage to haul with you into a presidential campaign.