President Donald Trump's right-wing populism has long been central to his appeal to voters, but according to MS NOW columnist Zeeshan Aleem, that pitch has been a "scam" all along — and the administration's "unusual" new obsession with small-dollar fraud proves it.

In a piece published Monday morning, Aleem highlighted reports that the Trump administration has been "escalating its efforts to crack down on suspected small-scale fraud involving government-funded programs," placing "an inordinate focus" on small-time offenses. He argued that the push "should be understood as a bid to vilify programs meant to help vulnerable people," while also drawing attention away from more consequential fraud cases that have historically commanded federal resources.

"The New York Times pointed out the Justice Department's new and unusual focus on small-dollar fraud," Aleem wrote, citing the paper's reporting. "A food truck in Santa Ana, California, caught prosecutors' attention because of a suspiciously large proportion of transactions using Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program cards. A cashier at a Los Angeles grocery store was accused of accepting about $10,000 worth of SNAP (food stamps) cards as payment and giving undercover federal immigration officers cash for them."

"These are striking low-level cases for federal law enforcement," he added. "As the Times notes, federal prosecutors have 'generally observed minimum-dollar thresholds in fraud cases, and in many U.S. attorney's offices in large cities, the threshold sits around half a million dollars.' Jacqueline Kelly, a former federal prosecutor, told the Times that a food truck 'is not the kind of case you would typically see federal law enforcement resources being poured into.' Such cases are typically handled by state or local officials."

The concentration of federal cases targeting alleged SNAP fraud — which Aleem described as extremely rare — serves, in his view, as evidence that the administration is seeking "a pretext for vilifying those programs and wrongly characterizing them as widely misused." Taken together with similar tactics used against Medicaid, he argued, these examples show that Trump continues to wage a "war against the poor," even as large-scale white-collar fraud receives less emphasis.

At the same time, Aleem noted, the administration has massively scaled back federal efforts to crack down on "more consequential fraud," including white-collar fraud. Trump has also issued a striking number of pardons to individuals convicted of white-collar fraud, "many of whom are his political allies."

"And, of course, Trump himself is exploiting the extraordinary power of the presidency in ways that constitute a defrauding of the public — even if the law doesn't prohibit it," Aleem added. "Why should a man entrusted to head the state be able to own a vast array of assets that people can use to curry favor with him and which he can and does enlarge through his own policymaking?"

He concluded: "Once again, we can see the perverse logic of right-wing populism. We see who gets painstakingly scrutinized and who gets gentle treatment. MAGA politicians claim to be defending the interests of everyday Americans, but in reality, they serve as handmaidens to the rich and the powerful, while using misinformation and culture wars to sell an economic program that screws over working people. Right-wing populism is a scam. Trump's permissiveness toward wealthy fraudsters and fixation on rendering government programs as fraudulent helps prove it."