Welcome To King Donald’s Court And The Rose Garden Club.

They feast on America’s dime and are literally allowing the sick, poor, young and old go hungry and not have healthcare. This is our Republican Party and President. It is not sustainable.

There’s something so repulsive about the spectacle of Trump’s “Rose Garden Club” that it seems to only have been possible in this specific time. Trump time. On September 5, as the president unveiled his $2 million renovation—yellow-and-white striped umbrellas straight out of Mar-a-Lago, embedded presidential seals in the stonework, speakers piping Billy Joel across what used to be Jackie Kennedy’s garden—Republican lawmakers gathered for the inaugural feast. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Representative Ronny Jackson, Senator Dave McCormick, arranged at corner tables draped in white linen, yellow roses, place cards announcing “The Rose Garden Club at the White House.” Rose Garden Salad (tomatoes, iceberg lettuce), followed by steak or chicken, chocolate cake for dessert. Trump, gripping his microphone like a cruise director, welcomed his guests to what he called “a club” for “people that can bring peace and success to our country.”

One thinks of Versailles. One thinks of Louis XVI and his court, dining on ortolans and champagne while bread riots consumed Paris. One thinks, rather gleefully, about what eventually happened to that particular monarch and his well-fed aristocracy. History has a way of repeating itself, and it’s rarely gentle with those who mistake governing for luxury dining.

These lawmakers, dabbing their lips with White House napkins, posting selfies for Instagram, had just orchestrated one of the most vicious attacks on America’s most vulnerable citizens in modern history. And they did it with our money—the taxes we pay, the dollars extracted from every paycheck—while treating us like we should be grateful for the privilege of funding their little soirée. C’est la vie.

Until it is not.

This isn’t governing. This is Louis XVI cosplay, funded by people who can’t afford to eat. The $2 million garden renovation, the offical dinners that cost up to $572,000, every chef and server paid from public coffers—it’s all theatre designed to make these people forget what they actually are: hired help. Employees. Our employees.

Except somewhere along the way, Trump and his Congressional enablers got confused about the org chart. They’ve begun to believe they’re the Sun King and we’re the peasants, when the reality is precisely the reverse. Every dollar they spend is ours. Every decision they make should be in our service. They work for us—all of us, not just the ones who donated to their campaigns or voted for their party. That’s the job description. That’s what a representative democracy means. Somehow they’ve managed to miss that fundamental point entirely, or more likely, they’ve decided it’s inconvenient to remember.

By October 21, when they slithered back for act two—cheeseburgers, fries, “Rose Garden chocolates”—the government shutdown they’d engineered had entered its third week. Trump glowed. Senator John Thune announced this was “the fourth week of the Democrat shutdown” and Republicans were “unified.” The audacity is admirable: shut down the government, refuse to negotiate, withhold food and healthcare from millions of Americans, then congratulate yourselves at the “club.”

Oh, don’t worry about the check - we got that.

More than 42 million Americans who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—SNAP, for those keeping score—face the loss of their November benefits. South Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania: state after state has announced they cannot issue payments if the shutdown continues. Over 260,000 households in South Carolina alone. The USDA has ordered states to hold November payments “until further notice,” and here’s the kicker: there’s a $6 billion contingency fund sitting right there, available, ready to be deployed. The Trump administration has simply chosen not to use it. Not can’t. Won’t. The money exists. They’re just not releasing it. Perhaps they’re saving it for the ball room?

Meanwhile, children are losing access to school meals automatically when their families lose SNAP benefits. Parents—actual human beings with actual children who need to eat—are being forced to choose between rent and food. Local food banks report demand spiking as SNAP benefits run out toward month’s end. Those benefits, by the way, average $188 per month. Roughly two dollars per meal. Not exactly caviar and champagne, but apparently still too generous for our hamburger-chomping legislators to stomach.

Healthcare? Enhanced ACA subsidies are expiring, premiums doubling—114% increases, from $888 annually to $1,904. A 60-year-old couple making $85,000 faces a $23,000 premium spike. That’s not a typo. Twenty-three thousand dollars for the privilege of health insurance in the richest nation on earth. Millions are now calculating whether they can afford to stay alive, placing bets with their own mortality while Congress debates over cheeseburgers whether American citizens deserve not to die from treatable illnesses.

The calculus is simple, really. The enhanced ACA subsidies they’re blocking would save people an average of $1,016 annually—less than Trump spent on those yellow umbrellas. The $6 billion SNAP contingency fund they refuse to release? Three times what he dropped on the garden renovation.

The shutdown is merely the appetizer. In July, Trump signed his “One Big Beautiful Bill”—Orwellian branding that would be laughable if it weren’t carving up 42 million lives. The largest cuts to SNAP in history: $186 billion over a decade, stripped from food assistance to fund tax breaks for the wealthy. It’s as if they studied the French Revolution and thought, “You know what? Those aristocrats didn’t go far enough.”

New work requirements punish veterans, homeless people, older adults, rural residents. States must now cover 75% of administrative costs instead of 50%. And here’s the pièce de résistance: 42 states with payment error rates above 6% face financial penalties for the crime of trying to feed people efficiently. It’s punishment for attempting to administer a program that Republicans have deliberately made impossible to administer. It is sinister.

The fallout for children? Twenty-two million families losing SNAP benefits, which automatically strips children of free school meals. Republicans want to raise the Community Eligibility Provision threshold from 40% to 60%, throwing 24,000 schools and 12 million children off universal free meal programs. School cafeteria directors are already planning: out go fresh apples and local beef, in come industrial slop and layoffs. “We’re the biggest restaurant in town,” one director said. “It would be a nightmare.”

I bet Mike Johnson found his steak quite satisfactory. Probably didn’t even need the knife—it was that tender. Not that it matters. Our “Cracker of the House” would eat Trump’s shit “on a shingle.” Not that either one would know what chipped beef and “shit on a shingle” refers to. While we all know they are both patriots - they bailed on the service part. Trump with those crippling bone spurs and Mike…what would have been his excuse? Wasn’t into “don’t ask, don’t tell? Or was he, that mighty “Christian,” a conscientious objector?

Nope. Remember - military folks are “suckers.”

So here we have it: Republican lawmakers gathering under their decorative umbrellas, dining on taxpayer-funded steak and chocolate cake, while the families they allegedly represent—the people who hired them, who pay their salaries, who fund every last napkin and fork on those white-clothed tables—face empty cupboards and canceled health insurance. They toast their unity while 42 million Americans wonder if they’ll eat next month. They celebrate at a “club” in what they keep calling the “People’s House” while systematically locking those same people out of the help they desperately need, the help that their tax dollars fund, the help that should be their right as citizens of a supposedly civilized nation.

Watch them closely when forced to discuss hungry children or uninsured families. The weariness. The exasperation. The barely concealed contempt. Americans—voters, taxpayers, the people who literally pay their salaries—have become an administrative nuisance. We’re interrupting the important work of governance, which consists mainly of tax cuts for donors and lengthy lunches about how unified they are in their savagery.

They’ve completely forgotten what public service means, assuming they ever knew. They work for all Americans—not just Republican Americans, not just wealthy Americans, not just the ones who can afford $50,000-a-plate fundraisers. Everyone. That’s the job. We hired them. We pay them. They seem to have this backwards, treating us like supplicants instead of employers. It’s rather like the palace guards at Versailles being confused about which side of the gate they were supposed to be on. That confusion didn’t end well for anyone.

Fiscal responsibility? Don’t make me laugh. These same Republicans who faint over food stamps just passed $4 trillion in tax cuts. They located money for active military by raiding research funds—proof money materializes when politically convenient. They just don’t find it convenient when Americans need to eat or access healthcare.

This is about priorities, power, and who gets treated like an inconvenience. Senator Thune stood in that garden declaring Republicans were “doing the right thing.” By what moral calculus is starving children and bankrupting families “right”? By what definition does dining on taxpayer-funded hamburgers while millions lose food assistance constitute public service?

Trump’s Rose Garden Club isn’t just vulgar excess—though it’s certainly that. It’s a monument to willful blindness, to a ruling class so divorced from reality they’ve paved over historic gardens to create their own Petit Trianon. The embedded presidential seals, the flag-styled drainage grates, the carefully curated playlist—it’s Marie Antoinette’s fake pastoral village, except instead of playing milkmaid, they’re playing populist while systematically destroying the actual population.

History offers guidance here. Louis XVI and his court believed they were untouchable too. They dined lavishly while bread riots consumed Paris. They convinced themselves the peasants were ungrateful, that the problem was one of messaging rather than morality. They believed right up until the moment the guillotine taught them otherwise that they were doing the right thing, that they deserved their luxury, that the people existed to serve them rather than the reverse.

The French figured out eventually who worked for whom. It took a revolution, but they sorted it. One hopes Americans won’t need to be quite so dramatic to remind their elected employees that we’re the ones who hired them, we’re the ones who pay them, and we can bloody well fire them too.

Trump’s precious garden club stands as a $2 million fuck-you to every American struggling to feed their children or afford healthcare. It’s their Versailles moment, playing out in real time. We know how that story ended. They’d be wise to remember it before the American people decide to provide a refresher course in who actually owns this country—and it’s not the people dining under those yellow umbrellas.

They’re not doing the right thing. They’re playing aristocrat with our money while we pick up the tab for their costumes. The only question left is whether they’ll learn the lesson peacefully or whether history will have to teach it to them the hard way. Revolutions don’t begin with manifestos—they begin with empty stomachs and $23,000 insurance premiums while the ruling class eats cake and calls it governance.

The American people are patient. But patience isn’t infinite, and neither is tolerance for being treated like the help by people we employ. They’d better hope the ballot box remains a sufficient remedy, because history suggests what happens when it stops being one. Gilded gardens don’t hold up well to pitchforks

Josh Powell is a healthcare writer, consultant, and former CEO of a leading multidisciplinary surgical center in New York. Most recently, he served as Project Manager for Columbia University’s NIH-funded HEALing Communities Study, addressing the opioid epidemic through evidence-based interventions.

His book, “AIDS and HIV Related Diseases,” published by Hachette Book Group, established him as an authoritative voice in healthcare. Powell’s insights have appeared in prestigious publications including Politico and The New England Journal of Medicine. As a recognized expert, he has been featured on major media outlets including CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS.

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