J’ai toujours faim à cause de Trump

Krugman has multiple good points about the Trump/Thune/Johnson suspension of SNAP benefits:

This is a political decision — specifically, a Republican decision

Despite the government shutdown, the SNAP program isn’t out of money. In fact, it has $5 billion in contingency funds, intended as a reserve to be tapped in emergencies. And if the imminent cutoff of crucial food aid for 40 million people isn’t an emergency, what is? The Department of Agriculture, which runs the program, also has the ability to maintain funding for a while by shifting other funds around. But Donald Trump has — quite possibly illegally — told the department not to tap those funds.

Furthermore, the Republican majority in the Senate could maintain aid by waiving the filibuster on this issue. They have done this on other issues — for example, to roll back California’s electric vehicle standard. But for today’s Republican Party, blocking green energy is more important than keeping 40 million Americans from going hungry.

Furthermore, passing legislation to keep food aid flowing would require that Mike Johnson, the speaker, call the House back into session – something which he refuses to do. While we don’t know for sure the reason behind Johnson’s refusal, there is widespread speculation that it’s to avoid swearing in the newly elected Arizona congresswoman Adelina Grijalva, who would supply the crucial vote needed to force an overall vote on releasing the Epstein files. It sounds crazy to say that Republicans are making children go hungry to protect pedophiles, but it’s actually a reasonable interpretation of the situation.

A lot of children are going to go hungry in large measure because Mike Johnson doesn’t want people to learn more about Donald Trump’s relationship with his good friend Jeffrey Epstein. It’s Armando Iannucci storyline only it’s entirely real.

It’s also worth noting again that both the shutdown of benefits and the pending savage cuts will both disproportionately impact Trump-supporting areas:

The pain from lost food aid will, if anything, hurt Republican voters worse than Democrats

Republican strategy on the shutdown has rested on the premise that Democrats will eventually cave, based on several assumptions. First, G.O.P. strategists expected the public to blame Democrats for the impasse. Second, they thought that Democrats, who favor big government, would be anxious to resume federal spending. Lastly, I suspect that many Republicans simply assumed that SNAP beneficiaries are disproportionately Democrats.

So far, however, the shutdown impasse has developed not necessarily to the G.O.P.’s advantage. A plurality of Americans place more blame on Republicans than on Democrats. Moreover, given that Democrats have been more unified in their stance than the Republicans, it’s not at all obvious that Democrats will capitulate over the issue of reduced government spending.

What about the partisan affiliation of SNAP recipients? I’d be curious to see a survey of Republican legislators and activists on who they think the typical food aid recipient is. My bet is that they’re still under the influence of Ronald Reagan’s 1970s stereotypes, in which a “strapping young buck” buys T-bone steaks with food stamps. That is, MAGA probably views food stamps as a welfare program for urban nonwhites, including illegal immigrants.

Yet the evidence suggests that the program is most important to overwhelmingly white rural counties that strongly supported Trump. This is shown by the map at the top of this post, in which darker colors correspond to greater SNAP use.

Consider, for example, Owsley County in Kentucky. The county is 96 percent white, and last year it cast 88 percent of its votes for Trump. Also, 37 percent of residents are on SNAP.

So by refusing to maintain food aid, Republicans are hurting many of their own supporters.

The fact that Trump-supporting communities rely heavily on federal food aid raises another, even larger question: Why does the GOP want to cut food assistance generally? Apart from refusing to fund SNAP during the government shutdown, Republicans want to drastically cut back on food stamps over the long term. Indeed, savage cuts to SNAP are a key feature of the One Big Beautiful Bill passed earlier this year – cuts that were scheduled to happen after the midterm elections, not a few days from now.

Whether any material number of non-affluent people will figure out that “Trump is for you” is the biggest lie in history, who can say.