It’s those feckless poors again
While the West Wing burns the midnight oil trying to manage its Epstein-related crisis, the Boss is still grousing about the hungry. Seeing how much attention SNAP benefits garnered during the shutdown, he may perceive people on food assistance as a political threat to be stomped.
“It really puts the country in jeopardy,” Trump told Fox News. Because those lazy poors will leave jobs that pay their rent to get free food.
The shutdown ended on Thursday after a record 43 days. But SNAP recipients were still awaiting their payments—and Brooke Rollins, the secretary of the Agriculture Department, which administers the program, dismissed these concerns in a CNN interview on Thursday. “SNAP is a broken program. SNAP is full of corruption,” Rollins said, claiming the administration had found the names of 186,000 dead people on SNAP lists in 29 states—but she offered no evidence that the dead people were receiving benefits.
Dead people on SNAP (who don’t eat), dead people on voter rolls (who don’t vote), dead people on Social Security (who don’t receive checks). It’s a wonder that MAGA Republicans find time for the needs of our struggling billionaires.
The Trump administration dug in its heels during the shutdown to stop funding SNAP from an emergency fund. What’s next?
“SNAP has not faced this extent or level of threat before,” said Jamila Michener, a government and public policy professor at Cornell University. It’s not like a program for low-income people is ever sitting safe and pretty in the United States, she said. But in such an unpredictable administration, “there could potentially be new threats” to food assistance and other vital programs.
With so much attention, SNAP watchers are hopeful that the public will understand food stamps better than before and fight against cutting or significantly altering the program. But “it’s in the spotlight, and I don’t know that that bodes well,” Chrisinger said.
Until the shutdown, SNAP hummed along rather efficiently, an incredibly complex machine fine-tuned over the decades. This interruption created new fractures and fault lines, and the differences in how states responded to the SNAP halts were “staggering,” Chrisinger said. “The chaos of this, politically and legally, is showing some of the cracks.”
That chaos presents a gold-leafed opportunity for a gold-digging president to kick down while he’s kissing up to dictators. Trump “beautifully” slashed $187 billion from SNAP in the bill he signed in July to fund tax breaks for the rich and connected. Meanwhile, the CBO projects that “about 4 million people, including children, seniors, veterans, and individuals with disabilities, will see the food assistance they need to afford groceries terminated or cut substantially.”
I stand corrected. The other day I stated that Trump has no ideology. Except for decreasing the surplus population. And in making the group above work for their food until they join the dead already on the list.
Even if SNAP survives Trump’s scrutiny for now and the program continues, it’s not great if he keeps harping on it. Framing the program as wasteful, inefficient, and fraudulent could sway public opinion about SNAP, Jones Cox said. Trump could use his bully pulpit to continue spreading misinformation about who receives SNAP and what they use it for, and that could influence legislation and the way states administer the program, Michener said.
“In this moment, it feels like nearly anything is possible when you are dealing with an administration that is in many ways expert at identifying where the cracks in our systems and our rules and our norms are, and leveraging those to the greatest extent possible to cause pain in the ways that [they] want to cause pain,” Michener said.
Yeeesss, pain.
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