The Hunger Games: How Trump’s SNAP Gambit Tears the Republic Apart
When a president weaponizes starvation against 42 million of his own citizens, he’s not governing—he’s ruling.
Author’s Note for Subscribers Only: Tomorrow, part three of my series: “The Grand Old Party: An Intimate Autopsy of how Paranoia, Prejudice, and Criminal Conspiracy Corroded American Democracy, One Year at a Time” continues with Ronald Reagan. It’s worth subscribing!
There’s a reason the Founding Fathers put “domestic Tranquility” in the preamble to the Constitution. They understood what every monarch since Rome knew: governments maintain legitimacy through a basic covenant. You don’t deliberately starve your own people. The Sun King didn’t cut off Paris’s food supply as a negotiating tactic. Even medieval warlords grasped that manufactured famine destroys the bonds that hold societies together.
When his engineered government shutdown reached its second month, the Agriculture Department announced it would suspend SNAP benefits for November. Not delay them. Simply stop feeding 42 million Americans—16 million of them children—because Trump couldn’t get his way with Congress.
Two federal judges intervened, ruling that the administration must use the $4.65 billion emergency contingency fund Congress specifically appropriated for this scenario. Trump’s USDA offered malicious compliance: 65% of benefits. Partial rations for the poor. Just enough to establish that generosity flows from his hand alone.
Judge McConnell saw through it, quoting Trump’s Truth Social confession: benefits would be restored “only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government...and not before!” He ordered full benefits by Friday. States scrambled to comply. Pennsylvania, Kansas, Wisconsin, California—the machinery of government lurching back to life.
Then Trump did something genuinely unprecedented. He ran to the Supreme Court—not just to block the federal benefits, but to stop states from spending their own money to feed their own residents.
Desperate states, watching children go hungry within their borders, moved to use their own budgets, their own reserves, to fill the void. And Trump demanded the nation’s highest court prevent sovereign states from showing compassion with their own resources.
The President conscripted the judiciary to enforce mass deprivation—not because there’s no money (there’s $4.65 billion in contingency funds plus $23 billion in Section 32 agricultural support), but because Trump requires total submission. Even mercy from state governments must be crushed if it interferes with his demonstration of absolute power.
Justice Jackson issued a stay Friday night. By Saturday morning, the USDA ordered states to “immediately undo” the feeding of hungry families. More than two dozen states now face “catastrophic operational disruptions” for the crime of trying to prevent starvation within their borders.
His Solicitor General claimed the administration can’t find billions “in the metaphorical couch cushions.” This from an administration that found plenty for Trump’s legal bills and Mar-a-Lago tax cuts. Cushions are only empty when children come looking.
What Trump has engineered is a demonstration that federalism itself—the core architecture of American governance—must bend to presidential will. State sovereignty? Negotiable. Local self-determination? Only with permission. Even spending your own money to feed your own people requires approval from Mar-a-Lago.
But let’s be absolutely clear about what’s happening right now, in real time, on our streets.
These past few weeks, we’ve watched a nation rise. Millions taking to the streets in protest. An election that delivered a stunning rebuke of Trump and everything he represents. The American people spoke—loudly, unmistakably, decisively.
And Trump’s response? He takes away food.
When the courts try to stop him, he goes back to court. Again and again. He’s showing us with perfect clarity that he will not stop.
ICE. The National Guard. The federal judiciary. He is systematically weaponizing every instrument of government against the governed. This is no longer government of the people, by the people, for the people. We are watching the transformation into a government where the people serve Trump.
And here’s what every historian of collapsing republics will tell you: this causes violence. Not someday. Now.
When you starve people, they don’t politely accept it. When you crush state sovereignty, governors don’t simply comply. When you weaponize every institution meant to protect citizens and turn those institutions against them instead, people fight back. Survival demands it.
Trump knows this. This is not incompetence or miscalculation. This is strategy.
And let’s dispense with any lingering illusions about the man’s capacity for using human suffering as currency. Remember Ukraine? Remember when Trump withheld nearly $400 million in military aid—aid that Congress had appropriated, aid that a nation under Russian attack desperately needed—because he wanted dirt on Joe Biden? Remember how he was perfectly willing to let Ukrainian soldiers die, let Ukrainian civilians be slaughtered, let an entire democracy fall, all to save his failing political prospects?
He got impeached for that. The first time.
If Trump would let Ukrainian people die to manufacture an advantage against a political opponent, don’t kid yourself about what he’ll do to Americans. This isn’t hypothetical anymore. This isn’t “what if” or “he wouldn’t dare.” He’s doing it. Right now. He’s starving 42 million Americans—16 million of them children—for the exact same reason he held Ukraine hostage: because human suffering is just another tool in his kit, another form of leverage, another way to extract submission.
The pattern is unmistakable. Withhold aid. Watch people suffer. Blame your enemies. Offer relief only in exchange for total capitulation. Whether it’s Ukrainians facing Russian tanks or American children facing empty refrigerators, the calculation is identical. The cruelty is identical. The contempt for human life is identical.
He is manufacturing the conditions for violent resistance so he can justify violent suppression. He is engineering the crisis that will allow him to declare emergency powers, to suspend more rights, to tighten the authoritarian grip even further.
The ICE raids, the National Guard deployments, the court battles over feeding hungry children—these aren’t separate controversies. They’re a coordinated assault on the basic premise of American democracy. Trump is stress-testing how much we’ll tolerate. How far he can push before we break. How many institutions he can corrupt before we stop him.
And every time we don’t stop him, every time we rationalize or normalize or look away, we’re answering his question: he can push further. He can take more. He can starve children, crush states, weaponize courts, and face no meaningful consequences.
The violence that’s coming—that’s already here—isn’t some unfortunate side effect of political polarization. It’s the intended result of deliberate policy. Trump is creating the conditions for civil conflict because civil conflict justifies autocracy. Chaos enables dictatorship. Violence is the excuse for absolute power.
We are past the point of warnings. Past the point of “this could happen.” It is happening. Right now. In grocery stores where SNAP cards are declined. In state capitals where governors are told they cannot feed their own people. In courtrooms where judges are overruled for showing mercy. In streets where protesters are met with ICE agents and National Guard troops.
Democracy doesn’t die in darkness, whatever Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post wants to print on its masthead. The publisher himself proved that much. No—in Trump’s America, democracy is being attacked and raped in broad daylight, with cameras rolling, with witnesses everywhere, while the institutions that should defend it either collaborate or stand paralyzed.
Violence is here. It’s coming from both directions now—desperate Americans fighting to survive and the machinery of state repression crushing anyone who resists. We’ve seen it for weeks, ICE fight ordinary Americans. Local police fight ICE. And it is only getting worse.
We will see revolution or subjugation. Or maybe maybe revolution and subjugation are already upon us?
When do millions of people in streets do more than march?
What happens when “Trump’s National Guard” becomes nothing more than what ICE is to the “illegals”? It always seems to start this way. Historically, at least.
We might be in the end game. Trump has moved from testing boundaries to demolishing them entirely.
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Shame on the GOP MAGA Nazi's!