The recent government shutdown, longest in our history, is now fading into memory, but no one should forget which party refused to negotiate while applying political pressure by taking food from millions of Americans’ mouths and refusing to pay air traffic controllers, so Americans encountered chaos at the nation’s airports.
A refusal to fund SNAP benefits, despite court orders, leaving 42 million Americans hungry; a desire to get unhoused people out of sight and out of mind; a likely 53% income tax increase for people who make $15,000 or less; a willy-nilly tariff policy that raises prices for all American consumers, costing the average household thousands a year — just for starters, as U.S. trading partners organize to cut America out of the equation as much as possible.
I’m old enough to remember Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and I can tell you that those Christian-like efforts have been turned on their head to become Donald Trump’s anti-Christian War on the Poor.
It reminds one of how Charles Dickens, in response to Britain’s 19th-century Poor Law, an amendment to earlier poor laws, that required the poor to live in purposely unpleasant workhouses, wrote “Oliver Twist.”
Trump’s Big Brutal Bill amounted to nothing more than the rich taking more from the poor and working class. Republicans will never stop insisting, against all evidence, that giving tax breaks to the wealthy and big corporations results in economic growth, when what actually helps the economy is to help poor and working people (perhaps especially the working poor). Each dollar of SNAP benefits distributed is worth $1.50 to $1.80 to the economy, helping not only employees at grocery stores but also rippling along the food distribution supply chain to truckers, warehouse workers and farmers.
Republicans will never stop insisting, against all evidence, that giving tax breaks to the wealthy and big corporations results in economic growth, when what actually helps the economy is to help poor and working people.
But Trump and MAGA know nothing about any multiplier effect; they know only how to divide. Remember, Trump only recently learned the words “groceries” and “affordability,” so with him it’s best to stick with Gilded Age–era economic terms. After all, “tariff” remains the most beautiful word in Trump’s paltry lexicon (along with “frankly” and “me”).
If members of the Trump administration were led by open minds instead of the rigid ideology spelled out in Project 2025, they might understand that SNAP benefits as economic boosters and a bulwark against recession. But, as financial and economics writer Morgan Harman notes in a succinct essay, the benefits of feeding the hungry go far beyond the obvious immediate economic ones:
When children eat adequately, they perform better in school. When working families don’t choose between food and rent, they maintain stable housing and employment. When seniors afford proper nutrition, they face fewer health crises. These human outcomes have economic dimensions, but they matter first because they’re the right thing to do.
In the aftermath of the murder of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, by a homeless and mentally ill man in Charlotte, North Carolina, “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade mused that mentally ill unhoused people should be euthanized if they refuse treatment. (He apologized, but faced on consequences either at Fox News or in society.)
How about the Republicans’ cuts to Medicaid, amounting $1 trillion over the next decade? Medicaid is the federal-state health insurance plan for some 70 million Americans. The defunding will result in hundreds of rural hospitals and clinics closing, hurting everyone, including Trump supporters.
The Republican budget also ties Medicaid benefits to harsher work requirements and does not extend the tax credits for people purchasing health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. The longest government shutdown in history, with Trump refusing any negotiations with Democrats, essentially happened so Republicans could ensure that millions of Americans would no longer be able to afford health insurance.
We ought to call those Medicare cuts the Unaffordable Care Act.
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Should I list a few more examples of Trump policies that will hurt poor and lower-income Americans?
How about cutting housing assistance to low- and moderate-income families? And eliminating federal support for pre-schools, after-school programs and literacy programs. Killing the jobs created, mostly in rural areas, by the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Act. Gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created to protect people like you and me from the predatory practices of banks and other financial service companies.
If Trump really thought he might have a chance to get into heaven, he should just read that paragraph again. Truly, the only question he might legitimately have about his fate after shuffling off this mortal coil is which of Dante’s circles of hell he has rightfully earned.
The same flint-hearted philosophies that underwrote the English Poor Law are at work in this country under the Trump administration.
That takes us back to John Dickens, financially ruined by lack of work, who ended up with his family at Marshalsea debtors’ prison, while his 12-year-old son Charles was forced to work in a rat-infested boot-blacking warehouse, an experience that haunted him for the rest of his life. What would Dickens have made of Trump’s recent Gatsby–themed party at Mar-a-Lago while 42 million Americans were cut off from food assistance? Or his statement earlier this month that he didn’t “want to hear about the affordability”?
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Republicans love Christmas more than, well, seemingly anything. They’ve been howling about people saying “Happy holidays” and “Season’s greetings” for decades. Well, perhaps that saying inside a phony gold–encrusted White House Christmas card this year: ought to have a Dickensian touch: “Don’t Talk to Me About Affordability! You’re All Bob Cratchit to Me!”
As Adam Serwer famously wrote in the Atlantic during Trump’s first interminable term, the organizing principle behind the entire MAGA movement is cruelty and hatred of others. There have been numerous variations on “the cruelty is the point” since then, but Serwer’s take remains the original.
We can’t afford to forget the recently-concluded government shutdown amid an onslaught of other news, nor can we forget who played politics with hunger and air traffic safety in America, or who continues working overtime to subvert the rule of law and to crush all economic classes below their multi-millionaire and billionaire bros.
This is indeed a war on the poor, but with Trump’s endless bullying of our historic allies and his illogical trade wars, it’s also a war on the future of all Americans, for generations to come.
Autocrats don’t want healthy, educated citizens who can stand up to them. They want illiterate, groveling serfs, who live in fear and don’t stick around too long. Dickens knew all about that kind of Christian.
