Reagan invoked the “welfare queen” alongside another, equally racist trope of the “strapping young buck” — a Black man using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks while thrifty Americans made do with hamburgers. Reagan’s message was clear: undeserving Black people were cheating the food stamp program, wasting benefits paid for by working white taxpayers. Reagan’s claims about fraud stirred up a media frenzy, with stories that persistently misrepresented the food stamp program, overstated the generosity of the benefits people received, and failed to mention that such cases were just a small fraction of the 22 million families enrolled in the program.