No racist Republican trope has survived the test of time quite like that of the “welfare queen.” The alleged indolent fraudster — usually depicted as a person of color — leeching off of government assistance programs at the taxpayer’s expense. Under Donald Trump, the accusation of widespread fraud by minorities and migrants has been used to justify brutal crackdowns on immigration, massive cuts to social safety net programs, and the forcing millions of Americans from basic health care access.
While some Republicans would like to brag about their anti-fraud bonafides, their ideological allies are there to ensure they remember exactly who they’re supposed to be portraying as the problem.
This week, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican and former Trump press secretary, courted the outrage of her party when she released an ad touting a “welfare-to-work” requirement for government assistance recipients in her state. The problem? The welfare recipient depicted in the ad was a white, male, gamer — cheese balls and VR headset included —- named “Brad.”
Sean Davis, editor at the right-wing blog The Federalist, fumed that “our government has systematically discriminated against white men for decades now, and yet now has the audacity to dishonestly mock young white men as welfare queens.”
“This is absolute dogshit messaging. Is that really the GOP’s position: that America’s insane welfare bill is a result of young white men,” complained British right-wing commentator Charles Cornish-Dale, known online as “Raw Egg Nationalist.”
Right-wing pastor Joel Webbon was explicit: “Why pick a White man? You should make your message more believable by picking someone Black.”
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, who exists almost entirely as a Twitter troll at this point, raged that “black people are astronomically more likely to be on welfare than white people. So the number of single young white male ‘Brads’ abusing the welfare system is minuscule. Practically non-existent. But of course Republicans don’t have the balls to do this ad with ‘Shaniqua’ as the villain.”
Career conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich quickly speculated that “republicans are running a demoralization campaign against white men. They don’t want them to vote in the midterms. This is sabotage at a level rarely seen.”
A couple things here. Non-hispanic whites account for more than a third of the nation’s welfare and food assistance recipients. Women are more likely to seek assistance because they are also more likely to be responsible for children and household management. Most people who receive government assistance work in some form, or are full time caretakers. And besides, the image of the young, male couch potato wrongfully suckling off the federal teat has been a Republican boogyman for over a year now.
“Able-bodied people, 35-year-olds sitting at home playing video games, they’re going to now have to go get a job,” Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) said in July of last year while defending widespread cuts to Medicaid forced through Congress by Republicans.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) provided a similar defense of the bill. “If you clean [Medicaid] up and shore it up, you save a lot of money, and you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day.”
Those were, at the time, disingenuous attempts to justify cutting social safety programs for everyday Americans in order to pay for another round of Trump-sponsored taxations boons for the wealthy. It’s not enough for Republicans like Huckabee Sanders to raise the specter of welfare fraud. They must inject virulent racist tropes maligning people of color in order to comply with the orthodoxies of the Trumpian right.
