The MAGA world is turning on one of its own.
Pro-Trump, far-right influencers attacked Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, who served as President Trump’s press secretary from 2017 to 2019, after she posted a campaign ad promoting her state’s work requirements for many Medicaid recipients.
In the ad, which Ms. Sanders posted on social media on Monday morning, an unkempt, young white man named Brad mashes the buttons of his video game controller. He throws cheese balls and potato chips into his mouth, often missing.
“Brad has turned relaxing into a full-time profession,” Ms. Sanders tells the camera. “But you, you actually work hard. You pay taxes to cover welfare for guys like Brad, who just choose not to work. That’s why I launched a welfare-to-work requirement.
“Now, more Arkansans are working than ever before,” Ms. Sanders says. “Even Brad.”
In the next frame, Brad is shown with freshly combed hair. He adjusts his tie and flashes a thumbs up.
The ad instantly drew blowback from the kinds of once-fringe figures that the Republican Party brought into the fold under Mr. Trump. Critics almost exclusively expressed anger that the protagonist was a white man. Several of them demanded that Ms. Sanders take down the ad, issue an apology and fire the staff members who helped produce the TV spot, accusing her of engaging in “anti-white racism.”
Jack Posobiec, a right-wing commentator best known for fueling the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory about a child abuse ring at a Washington restaurant, called the ad “Antiwhite” and criticized Ms. Sanders for airing it in the run-up to the midterm election, suggesting it would alienate white voters.
“It’s a lesson in what not to do when it comes to optics,” Mr. Posobiec said in a video accompanying his post, while saying he supported Ms. Sanders’s policy.
Many of her critics claimed the ad gave a false impression about the demographics of welfare recipients. Yet enrollees of Arkansas’ Medicaid expansion — the focus of the “welfare to work” program — are overwhelmingly white, according to an analysis of data from August that the State Department of Human Services provided to The New York Times. They are slightly more likely to be female than male.
More than 60 percent of the roughly 218,000 Medicaid expansion enrollees in the state reported that they are white, 18 percent reported that they are Black and 16 percent did not report their ethnicity. More than three-quarters of them are between 18 and 49 years of age. Women make up 54 percent of the program’s beneficiaries, according to the data.
In a social media post, Sean Davis, the co-founder of The Federalist, a conservative online magazine, said, “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.”
Will Chamberlain, a conservative lawyer and influencer who worked on Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, accused Ms. Sanders of “anti-white racism.” In a video posted on social media on Monday, he said the ad was “how you end a national political career before it even begins.”
Also joining in the criticism were Matt Walsh, a right-wing podcaster and prominent Trump supporter; Mike Cernovich, a Trump defender and far-right commentator; and Caleb Pascoe, a lobbyist for the American Principles Project, a social conservative advocacy group.
Ms. Sanders’s ad seemed to provoke some of the anger that Mr. Trump capitalized on during each of his runs for office: A feeling among men, and white men in particular, that the country has turned against them.
The onslaught of criticism prompted Ms. Sanders to defend the ad, but she did not address accusations of racism.
“Some critics online don’t like my welfare work requirement ad,” Ms. Sanders said in a post on X on Monday afternoon. “Next thing you know they’ll say I should have used cookies instead of cheese balls. If you are able-bodied you should not collect welfare simply because you choose not to work. Period.”
Arkansas is rolling out the new work requirements for many Medicaid recipients — or the “welfare to work” program, as Ms. Sanders calls it — as part of mandates in Mr. Trump’s sweeping tax and budget bill.
The Medicaid expansion program allows adults who make up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level in Arkansas to qualify for government-funded health care. Officials in Arkansas expect enrollment in the program to decrease by 20 percent once the new federal work requirements take effect on Jan. 1, according to The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
A March report from the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, found that 23 percent to 45 percent of enrollees in the state could lose coverage by 2028. In total, more than 800,000 Arkansans benefit from Medicaid coverage; more than half of them are children.
Arkansas’ population is 75 percent white and 15 percent Black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Roughly 10 percent of Arkansans identify as Hispanic or Latino.
Mr. Trump won Arkansas by more than 30 points in 2024, and Ms. Sanders is favored to win re-election in the red state. Her campaign has continued to air the ad on cable television across Arkansas, according to data from the media-tracking firm AdImpact.
The post An ad about welfare fraud draws a MAGA backlash. appeared first on New York Times.
