AMERIKA
Fraud, Drugs, and Hope for 2026
January 5, 2026
Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
The year 2025 ends the way Donald Trump began his foray into politics: full-fledged, unapologetic racism. Team Trump is pushing his anti-Somali campaign for three big reasons.
First, insofar as he succeeds, it justifies his mass deportation. He has explicitly attacked Somalis as a people and imposed new bans on their entering the country. The immediate cause is that some were involved in committing fraud against government programs, sort of like white people. Remember, as Trump always says, no one knows more about fraud than he does. Anyhow, by highlighting and exaggerating the actual fraud committed by some Somalis in Minnesota, Trump is making the case for his deportation policy.
The second reason is that it is a weapon against Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Walz is a popular two-term governor running for re-election in November and a potential 2028 presidential candidate. By blaming Walz for the fraud, and also Biden, Trump is helping to build up the absurd image of Democrats corruptly coddling immigrants with government handouts. (The fraud was discovered and prosecuted under Biden.)
While this line is regularly pushed by Elon Musk and other whack jobs, it has little basis in reality. There is a long way between immigrants entering the country and then voting in elections. And contrary to what Musk keeps asserting, there are almost no instances of immigrants voting before they are citizens.
Furthermore, when immigrants do become citizens and vote, many vote Republican. According to a poll shortly before the 2024 election, Harris was beatingTrump by 15 percentage points among naturalized citizens. But in many important states the margin was considerably smaller: In Florida it was less than 12 points, in Texas less than 10, and in Michigan it was just 1.4 points. If the Democrats’ strategy is to bring immigrants into the country, so that a decade or so later they will give their candidates a modest voting margin, it doesn’t seem like a very smart one.
But tying Democrats to fraud committed by immigrants is a major Republican election theme. The Republicans will play this tune as often as possible.
The third reason for pushing the Somali fraud story is that it gets the Trump-Epstein scandal off the front pages. The Epstein story has been disastrous for Trump. While most of the country has long known he is a sleazy sexual predator, the Epstein story had been weaponized among his base as an account where Democrats were protecting child sex traffickers.
Now it is clear that Trump was good buddies with Epstein and is doing everything he can to block release of the documents and photos that prove this. That is hard to take for even many hard-core MAGA types. Anything Trump can do to change the topic is great for him and playing the racist card with Somalis seems an obvious route.
As far as the truth of the story, clearly there was fraud committed by people of Somali origin, which was being pursued and prosecuted under Biden, as in not protected. It is also almost certain that the Trumpers are hugely exaggerating the extent of the fraud.
For example, Trump-appointed First Assistant US Attorney Joe Thompson claimedthat more than $18 billion (roughly the current year’s Medicaid budget) in Medicaid payments since 2018 might have been fraudulent. This seems implausible for the simple reason that Minnesota’s per capita Medicaid spending is not obviously out of line with other states.
It spends somewhat more than red states like Ohio and Missouri, but considerably less than blue states like Massachusetts and New York. It would take a more thorough analysis of relative health care costs and the age distribution of the populations to say anything definitive about relative spending and the potential impact of fraud, but the headline numbers don’t make a clear case for widespread fraud.
As far as the credibility of the Justice Department in making claims about Somalis committing fraud in Minnesota, remember Pan Bondi said that she had the Epstein files on her desk back in February. We are now up to 5.2 million pages.
Trump Rx Is Not Likely to Save Us Money on Drugs
We all know that Trump likes boasting about he is bringing drug prices down 500 percent, 600 percent, 800 percent. As a practical matter, it doesn’t seem as though his negotiations with the drug companies are likely to produce substantial savings for almost anyone.
This is unfortunate, since we waste an enormous amount of money paying for drugs. We spent more than $730 billion this year on prescription drugs and other pharmaceutical products. That comes to more than $5,800 per household.
The really tragic part of the story is that drugs are almost invariably cheap to manufacture and distribute. If we paid for the research upfront, as we already do to the tune of $50 billion a year at NIH, we could sell the drugs without patent monopolies or related protections. In that case, we would likely spend around $150 billion a year if drugs were sold in a free market.
This would mean that doctors could prescribe the best drugs for their patients, without being concerned about the cost. And patients wouldn’t have to do GoFundMe’s to pay for their drugs.
Allowing drugs to be sold in a free market would also remove the enormous incentive for corruption, where drug companies lie about the safety and effectiveness of their drugs. The most extreme episode of this corruption was the opioid crisis, but it is always a problem.
Unfortunately, despite ranting about corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, RFK, Jr. seems determined to go the opposite direction. He is cutting back government funded research, making the country more dependent on patent monopoly supported research.
As far as Trump’s negotiations with the drug companies, we got the answer in the stock prices of the big drug companies. They have risen sharply over the last six months. Stock investors can often be irrational, but if they expect drug prices to be substantially lower in coming years. This would mean a substantial reduction in profits, the expectation of which surely would cause stock prices to plunge. Obviously, the big money folks don’t believe Trump has lowered drug prices by 1,000 percent.
In fact, Trump has arranged for a relatively small group of people, those who don’t have insurers or the government paying for their drugs, to get discounts. That’s a nice gesture, but TrumpRx duplicates services that already exist, including some discounts provided directly by the drug companies. But the important thing is that Trump got his name on something.
Hope on Climate in 2026
Many people were disappointed that the climate summit in Brazil last month didn’t lead to any serious commitments to reduce greenhouse gases. While this is disappointing, it should not be surprising. The petulant 10-year-old in the White House made it clear that he sees efforts to slow global warming as an act of aggression that could lead to retaliation.
Given this reality, it is understandable that government leaders would not want to put a target on their backs by making bold commitments on transitioning to clean energy. But what matters more than commitments, which are not binding anyhow, is what countries actually do. And here the story is very good.
The New York Times had a major article yesterday about how South Africa and other Sub Saharan countries are rapidly adopted solar power. This is not a matter of policy, rather it is now the cheapest most reliable form of energy available. That is now the story in much of the world.
There is a similar story with electric vehicles. Close to 60 percent of new cars sold in China are now electric and in some developing countries the share is even higher. Chinese EVs are now much cheaper to buy and operate than fossil fuel powered cars. People who want to save money will buy EVs, regardless of their feelings about global warming. It is only high protectionist barriers that keep them out of the US market.
It would be good if the United States were leading the transition to clean energy, but Trump is doubling down on the horse and buggy industry at the dawn of the automobile age. That’s bad news for our economy, but it is good news that China has stepped up to take the lead.
And if we’re being serious, cheap electricity and cars are worth a thousand times more than vague unenforceable commitments at climate summits. The transition may still not go fast enough to prevent major damage to the planet, but at least things are turning in the right direction.
Will US Democracy Survive 2026?
Ultimately that is the biggest question to be answered in the year ahead. There are definitely some encouraging signs. The huge Democratic shift in pretty much all the elections and special elections in 2025 is a big deal. If that persists into the fall, the Democrats will retake the House by a large margin, and possibly the Senate as well.
We are also seeing more people willing to stand up to the Trump clown show, starting with some prominent Democratic politicians, like governors Pritzker and Newsom, and even late night comedians like Stephen Colbert and Jeffrey Kimmel. And the No Kings marches have been some of the largest days of protest in the country’s history.
Perhaps most importantly, it looks like the MAGA gang may be breaking up. Some of the people who just want tax cuts are getting a bit disgusted with the open racism, antisemitism, and outright craziness of the hard-core MAGA types. It’s too early to know whether this will cause a full-fledged split, but the signs are promising. No one wants to be on the losing team, and if we have fair elections next fall, Team Trump looks like a big loser.
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