How do Republicans sell their rather callous and inhumane policies to the American voters? They start by creating an inflated numerical fiction about an issue... say the number of undocumented immigrants involved in violent crime. They then create laws or executive orders with targets based on the fictitious numbers. Say the fiction is that over half a million undocumented immigrants are responsible for violent or felonious crimes. Because the actual number is nowhere near the number of individuals in their fiction (less than 50,000 split between sexual assault, murder, and burglary), they have to expand the net to include non-violent individuals with no felonies in order to hit their inflated targets. To maintain the fiction they have to accuse everyone they “disappear” of being a violent or felonious criminal. And, if those they detain have no due process, there is no way to validate the criminal claims against them, allowing the Republicans to maintain their original fiction.
Of course the real reason we have a large undocumented population to begin with is that we do not have enough documented people to provide much of the labor required to support our expected standard of living, so most undocumented immigrants are filling that gap. Rather than deal with the real problem of our immigration policies, the Republicans now have everyone, including Democrats and the media, focusing on border security and deportation. After all, as Trump pointed out last fall when he told the Republicans not to pass the bipartisan immigration bill, a broken immigration system was his strongest issue to run on, so don’t fix it. Rounding up and detaining groups of individuals provides much better visuals than the boring process of passing reasonable immigration reform to actually fix the problem. Just ask Christy Noem.
Currently we are seeing a similar pattern with Medicaid and SNAP cuts in Tump’s BBB. The Republicans started by creating an inflated numerical fiction that stated many of the people on those programs should not be covered because they were either scamming the system or are really undocumented immigrants (both of which are demonstrably fiction). Based on the inflated fictitious numbers, the Republicans preemptively cut the inflated percentage of the funding for the program claiming that “legitimate” recipients won’t be affected. However, when the Trump administration implements the program, just like with the inflated number of violent undocumented immigrants, they won’t able to meet the fictitious numbers they sold to their constituents. However, in this case they have already cut the budget so they will have to find additional legitimate recipients to remove from coverage, or reduce the care they cover. They likely will do much of this indirectly by creating bureaucratic forms and reporting requirements that will become so burdensome many recipients will lose their coverage, not because they don’t really need or qualify for the assistance but because they were unable to navigate the new Republican bureaucracy. And you thought Republicans were against bloated bureaucracy! Now they find it a useful tool to dodge personal responsibility for some pretty unpopular and immoral behaviors.
The Republicans are doing the same thing with the deficit. They generate fictitious numbers about how much additional tax revenue will come in to offset the new Republican debt. The fiction is that the tax breaks for the wealthy will stimulate strong economic growth which will generate enough new taxes to offset the revenue lost from the cuts. The problem with this fiction is that it has been tried several times over the past 75 years and the only time tax breaks stimulated economic growth was in the early 1960s when the majority of the tax breaks went to middle and lower income individuals, not the wealthy. The only growth trickledown economics ever stimulated in practice was to grow the deficit and grow the wealth gap each time it was tried.
The Pattern in Summary:
- Create an inflated fictitious number to create fear, anger, or concern
- Promise to reduce the fictitious number with a policy or program
- When implementation fails to reach the inflated fictitious number, widen the net to include individuals outside the original target specifications
- Create additional fictitious “progress tracking” numbers as needed to maintain the fiction (and eliminate real tracking programs that generate numbers that don't fit the fiction)
An interesting experience told by a former DOGE employee about chasing fictitious “fraud and abuse” numbers at the Veterans Administration:
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/02/nx-s1-5417994/former-doge-engineer-shares-his-experience-working-for-the-cost-cutting-unit
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Anticipating those who will point out that many Republican politicians know exactly what they are doing, I agree.
The majority of Americans do not approve of immigration and deportation policies based on white replacement theory but might believe the fiction around the number of “murderous and rapist” undocumented immigrants. You just need to find and widely publicize one or two actual cases and supplement those images with the fictitious frequency numbers. Once the program is going you try to hit the fictitious numbers by widening the net hoping that most people won’t notice the program is way off track from what they were sold and is really removing people base on their skin color and religious or political beliefs.
Likewise the Republican politicians know Medicaid and SNAP cuts are not based on actual large numbers of patient fraud and abuse (just ask Senator Rick Scott, R-FL, he knows about corporate Medicare fraud). The Bill’s “abuse and fraud” cuts are a conscious fiction meant to hide the real revenue lost from the billionaire tax cuts. The majority of Americans do not approve of this tradeoff, so the fiction of only getting rid of widespread fraud and abuse (they are hoping) will provide some cover.
The deficit fiction goes back at least to Reagan’s trickle down theory and has been used by Republicans several times since. It has failed to perform as advertised every time it has been tried and has been a primary cause of our current deficit, as most business leaders and economists now acknowledge and plan for. Do we really need to try it again? Apparently so.
