As bad as Minnesota’s $1 billion welfare fraud scandal is already, Tim Walz on Friday found a way to make it even worse.
The North Star State governor, the man Democrats would have made vice president of the United States, used a news conference to try to shift the focus away from his state’s huge Somali immigrant community — and to blame President Donald Trump for all the fuss in the first place.
In other words, the guy who famously called himself a “knucklehead” proved it again.
The irony of the setting was unavoidable — a dog and pony show where Walz and various state cronies rolled out a statewide fraud prevention program. (Step 1 is closing the barn door after making sure the horse has already run off.)
A questioner asked if he wanted to hear more from the Somali community taking “ownership and oversight” of systematic fraud that stole by the bucketload from COVID-era relief programs, Medicaid and efforts to feed hungry children.
Walz practically bristled, and pointed out — bizarrely — that “a lot of white men should be holding white men accountable for the crimes they have committed.”
He then noted that “Medicaid fraud will stretch across all racial demographics, all ethnic groups.”
Check it out here:
And it wouldn’t be a Democratic utterance in public if it didn’t find a way to point the finger at the man in the White House now.
“Each community’s got this in their own niche,” Walz said.
“To blame them and say they should have been responsible for stopping it, I think that’s a pretty hard reach …
“I think we continue to educate folks about why they shouldn’t commit crimes. You would hope that it’s being taught both at home and at schools and in our society, but no, I think this idea that the Somali community is to blame for this because they didn’t do more, I think that’s how we got into this …
“Donald Trump brought this to the attention, like this is something brand new. This is not brand new, and it’s being worked on. But he made it white hot. And, um, very dangerous.”
At its best, Walz’s statement is nonsense wrapped in non sequitur.
At its worst, it’s an admission of basic failure by Walz’s own state government — and the reason for it.
Incompetent scumbag Tim Walz says it’s a “pretty hard reach” to expect the Somali community to not engage in the massive theft of tax dollars, criticizes @POTUS for calling them out:
“Each community’s got this… Donald Trump brought this to the attention… very dangerous.” pic.twitter.com/ffqmpQcT7G
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) December 12, 2025
Medicaid fraud stretches across “all racial demographics”? Probably.
Man is a fallen creature, so crime exists everywhere. In Walz’s version of the world, that seems to make what happened in Minnesota perfectly normal.
But that’s not exactly relevant to the very specific problem of Minnesota’s fraud scandal, which was made possible by the evident incompetence of Walz’s own administration in making sure its citizens weren’t be robbed by what amounts to a guest population.
To be fair, he’s not completely wrong.
We shouldn’t be claiming the Somali community as much as we should be blaming Tim Walz, who allowed the fraud to balloon to these levels.
This falls on him.
— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) December 12, 2025
Walz’s “everybody does it excuse” also ignores the facts of this case, which was very specifically centered on the state’s Somali immigrant population — and included massive transfers of wealth back to Somalia, and even potentially into the Somalia terrorist group al-Shabaab.
It wouldn’t be asking much from the leaders of such a community to express regret at the crimes being committed. In fact, if a member of the community happened to rise to the level of, say, an outspoken Democratic congresswoman, that member might be expected to be particularly loud in her outrage over her compatriots ripping off the American taxpayers.
Instead, when it comes to Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Somalia native, the country hears mainly complaints about victimization.
What was even worse was Walz’s tacit admission that it was his own administration that was unable to stop the fraud.
Instead, he’s talking about how the country needs to “educate folks about why they shouldn’t commit crime.”
Why they shouldn’t commit crime? Most people understand already that a “crime” is something that, by definition, they shouldn’t commit.
The fact that Walz is saying this about a group that has escaped a North African hellhole and been welcomed into the United States makes it even worse.
Of course, collective guilt is anathema to American law as well as Western morality, but it’s safe to say that a group where literally life-saving generosity is repaid with theft on a massive scale is probably not exactly ripe for remedial lessons in ethics (not to mention the concept of “sin”).
But Walz really gave the game away when he tried to find a way to put responsibility on Trump for stoking the scandal to a “white hot” state. (It’s a rock-solid bet that “white hot” was no accident of phrasing.)
It wasn’t really Trump who made the Minnesota scandal national. If anything, it was a front-page report in The New York Times Nov. 29 that really brought it to the attention of the political class, the establishment media and the rest of the country. (Even the pious Times called the scandal “staggering in its scale and brazenness.”)
Yet Walz thinks he can save his own skin by turning the fire on Trump — the words of a liar with the motivation of a coward.
This is the man whom Democrats tried to put a heartbeat away from the presidency — a self-described “knucklehead” who’s humiliated himself, his party and his state by allowing one of the most sweeping cases of public fraud in the country’s history to take place on his watch.
In any setting it would be hard to make the Minnesota fraud scandal worse.
But Tim Walz just did it.
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