Voters under 50 probably won’t remember the “welfare queen”. But she once embodied Republicans’ claim of the underlying reason for US societal decay: the poor are a bunch of fraudsters.

Ronald Reagan introduced Linda Taylor to US voters at a rally during the Republican presidential primary season in 1976. A resident of Chicago’s South Side, Taylor had been arrested for welfare fraud. “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, five phone numbers to collect food stamps, social security, veteran’s benefits for four non-existing deceased veteran husbands,” Reagan said. “Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.”

Taylor may have committed crimes worse than social security fraud. But she wasn’t living on anything near $150,000. Josh Levin, author of The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth, points out that she was only ever charged with stealing $9,000. And yet, Reagan leveraged Taylor’s story to slash spending on welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, public housing and job training.

This woman of color on the bottom rungs of society – born out of a forbidden encounter in the deep south between a white mother and a black father – justified the proposition that to weed out corruption, the first place to look was among the (nonwhite) poor.

Half a century on, the Trump administration is dipping into the old imagery to buttress a violent campaign against what’s left of the US’s social safety net, and distract voters from the industrial-scale corruption that is, indeed, sinking America: the self-dealing by the president, his family and his friends.

Pages from Reagan’s 1980s playbook are being used to justify initiatives to eviscerate the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), and government-subsidized health insurance by claiming fraud by less fortunate Americans who, evidently, are learned in the art of grift.

The most recent discovery, announced by JD Vance’s anti-fraud taskforce, amounted to $40m defrauded from Snap. “There are people out there who decide to commit fraud against these programs who, quite literally in this case, will steal from the mouths of hungry children in order to enrich themselves,” the vice-president said in Ohio.

This came on the heels of Vance’s gleeful announcement that the administration had nixed the health coverage of 760,000 people insured under Obamacare on grounds of fraud. And it meshed nicely with Donald Trump’s offer of a bounty to whoever catches moochers grifting off the government’s dime. “If you turn somebody in, and you, let’s say, report, and you find $1bn, we are giving a commission to that person of 1%,” he said.

Trump probably thinks this is smart politics. But Americans are becoming alarmed over the corruption popping up all over the news. An October Harris poll for the Guardian found that government corruption is the second most important issue for voters heading to the polls, second only to the rising cost of living. Eighty-seven percent of respondents to the poll said corruption was a problem, a greater share than those worried about AI or immigration.

And yet there’s a hole in the president’s logic. Voters, according to the Harris poll, don’t seem too worried about people getting health insurance on the sly. They are worried about “elected officials putting their own or their donors’ financial interests ahead of the public”. Trump making billions off of crypto would probably fit that concern.

Vance has tried to address that complication. He claimed: “I have not seen a single shred of evidence that he participates or sanctions in that corruption.” Vance reminded the electorate that “this guy was a billionaire before he ever got into politics,” which in the vice-president’s mind probably limits Trump’s incentive to stick his hand in the cookie jar.

The 65% of voters planning to vote in the midterms who think this corruption is a “major problem”, are unlikely to buy that, though.

Last year, the US ranked as the 29th least corrupt nation on the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, a notch below its rank in the last year of the Biden administration and down from 18th in 2016, the year before Trump first came into office. Vance might want to read up on that. Or he might just open his eyes.

Trump making $2.2bn in his first year back in office, including $1.4bn from crypto, may not amount to corruption in the narrow sense preferred by his allies on the supreme court, who granted him immunity for any act that might be considered “official”. Trump might not have received direct bribes or agreed to a specific quid pro quo, offering to change policy in exchange for cash.

But, just for instance, Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) paused a lawsuit for fraud against a crypto billionaire who had bought $40m worth of $Trump meme coins and invested $75m in another Trump crypto business. Trump nixed the team at the justice department that investigated illegal uses of crypto, and dropped investigations into a variety of crypto companies, including Coinbase, Ripple and Kraken, that contributed to his campaign.

The Trump Organization, led by his son Eric, has been cutting deals left and right with regimes that have an indisputable interest in Trump’s foreign policy. A Vladimir Putin-connected oligarch financed a wedding party on a private island for the president’s son, Donald Jr. And Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is cutting billion-dollar deals with the rulers of countries with which he is conducting diplomacy on behalf of the US.

The Democratic congresswoman Rosa DeLauro has compiled a helpful list of the many ways Trump is enriching himself, his family and his allies while in office. It includes:

• The Qatari government gifted him a luxury jet, potentially violating the emoluments clause of the constitution.

• The UAE gained access to some tightly guarded, high-end American AI chips soon after an investment firm linked to its ruling family secretly bought a $500m stake in World Liberty Financial, the crypto company funded by the families of Trump and his chum Steve Witkoff.

• Rich people facing criminal charges have taken to donating to Trump’s political operations and then seeking pardons or clemency. Most recently, Wanda Vázquez Garced, the former governor of Puerto Rico, and the banker who paid her bribes, Julio Herrera Velutini, were pardoned after Velutini’s family gave a $50m deal to Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, and donated $3.5m to Trump’s Maga Inc Super Pac.

• The first family is also making a killing from the government. The Pentagon lent more than $600m to Vulcan Elements, a rare earths startup, just three months after Donald Jr’s venture capital firm 1789 Capital bought a stake in the outfit.

• Powerus, a drone maker backed by Eric and Donald Jr is selling drone interceptors to Persian Gulf allies of the US that are under attack by Iran, enriching the kids from a misbegotten war launched by the dad without consulting Congress.

A British researcher has also built an online tracker documenting hundreds of acts of corruption and abuse of office during Trump’s last 21 months in the White House.

The White House denies that the Trump family has ever engaged in any conflicts of interest, and denies granting any pardons or clemency in exchange for political donations.

Reagan may have been happy to cut poor Americans adrift. But he wasn’t in it for personal gain. Trump, by contrast, seems to think that going after moochers abusing Snap, offering Maga loyalists a bounty to catch a few, will distract voters from his efforts to leverage his office for cash.

Here’s to hoping that US voters – even those inclined to buy into images of undeserving “welfare queens” defrauding government aid programs – can recognize real corruption when they see it.