Hours after firing Pam Bondi as attorney general — and with reports that more Cabinet members could be on the chopping block — President Donald Trump has saddled his vice president with a title that became an albatross around the neck of his predecessor Kamala Harris for most of her time in office.

Trump took to social media on Friday to reiterate his desire to have Vice President JD Vance lead a nakedly political effort to harass state and local governments in places that did not vote for them in the 2024 election under the guise of cracking down on federal benefits fraud.

In a bizarrely-worded post to Truth Social, Trump wrote that Vance was “now in charge of ‘FRAUD’ in the United States” as he announced the veep’s new role, calling the problem “massive and pervasive.”

“The job he will be doing, in conjunction with many great people within the Trump Administration, will be a major factor in how great the future of our Country will be,” Trump said.

He added that Vance’s “focus will be ‘EVERYWHERE’” but stressed that the administration’s efforts would be targeted “primarily in those Blue States where CROOKED DEMOCRAT POLITICIANS, like those in California, Illinois, Minnesota (Somalia beware!), Maine, New York, and many others, have had a “free for all” in the unprecedented theft of Taxpayer Money.”

The president also claimed, without offering evidence, that the supposed amount of federal funds lost to fraud is “so large” that if Vance’s efforts are successful they would “literally” allow the U.S. to balance its’ budget, and said law enforcement agencies had already started “raids” in Los Angeles, the largest city in the largest state led by a Democratic governor and potential 2028 presidential candidate.

“Good Luck JD!” Trump added.

Trump had already signed an executive order last month putting Vance in charge of what Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called “anti-fraud task force” which will “investigate fraud across the country,” and his explicit declaration that Vance should be henceforth known as the administration’s “fraud Czar” appears to ignore the history of the way the Russian-language term has traditionally been used in conservative media and political circles as a pejorative against Democratic administration officials to imply such officials are unaccountable and power-hungry.

Vance’s predecessor, former vice president Kamala Harris, was saddled with the unofficial “Border Czar” moniker during her time in office across hundreds of television segments on Fox News and Newsmax, with the conservative networks pegging her work addressing migration from South and Central America to border security even though the latter subject was never in her policy portfolio.

Her Biden administration colleague, former Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, was similarly dubbed the “Climate Czar” by commentators who mocked his frequent international travel and cast him as an out-of-touch elitist working to force “green mandates” on working-class Americans.

During the Obama administration, then-Fox News host Glenn Beck made a habit of using a chalkboard to illustrate the dozens of administration officials — most of whom were low to mid-level advisors — who he referred to as “czars” working on what he described at the time as a wide-ranging “Marxist” plot to undermine the United States from within.

While Vance is ostensibly being tasked with leading federal efforts to crack down on benefits fraud, the administration’s focus on the subject has been largely a function of political imperatives, either to punish Democratic-led jurisdictions or sandbag Democratic politicians perceived as enemies to the president — or potential rivals to the vice president in future elections.

In January, Vance announced that the White House was creating a new assistant attorney general position at the Department of Justice for the specific purpose of fighting what he described as “fraud” in places such as Minnesota, where a right-wing YouTube influencer’s viral video about Somali-run health care businesses led the Department of Homeland Security to surge thousands of immigration enforcement officers and agents to conduct roving patrols that resulted in two innocent Americans being gunned down.

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