The Democrats had a great day yesterday. It’s crucial that they hone their economic message for next year’s midterms on affordability, based in fairness.
Trump is doing the opposite. Although a federal court ordered Trump to continue to provide food stamps to about 42 million low-income Americans who depend on them, Trump yesterday threatened to deny them anyway until the end of the government shutdown.
In a post on social media, he said benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly referred to as food stamps, “will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up the government, which they can easily do, and not before!”
How low Trump has sunk.
Eighty-eight years ago, in his Second Inaugural Address, Franklin D. Roosevelt told America that “the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
It was not a test of the nation’s military might or of the size of the national economy. It was a test of our moral authority. We had a duty to comfort the afflicted, even if that required afflicting the comfortable.
The Trump regime has adopted the reverse metric. The test of its progress is whether it adds to the abundance of those who have much and provides less for those who have too little. It is passing this test with flying colors.
The regime initially signaled its willingness to tap $4.65 billion in emergency money to fund food stamps, which would cover about half of this month’s benefits. As a result, some food aid would have started to go to American families who need it, but not nearly as much as they require — and not for weeks. New applicants this month wouldn’t get any.
Now, in direct defiance of the judge’s order, Trump is saying no food stamps will be provided at all — unless congressional Democrats relent on their demand.
And what is that demand? That lower-income Americans continue to receive subsidized health care. Otherwise, health care premiums for millions of lower-income Americans will skyrocket next year by an average of 30 percent because the Trump Republican “Big Beautiful” (Big Ugly) bill slashed Obamacare subsidies.
Republicans had rammed the Big Ugly through Congress without giving Senate Democrats an opportunity to filibuster it because Republicans used a process called “reconciliation,” requiring only a majority vote of the Senate.
The Big Ugly also requires Medicaid applicants and enrollees — also low-income — to document at least 80 hours per month of work.
Many people dependent on Medicaid won’t be able to do this, either because they’re incapable of working or won’t be able to do the required paperwork to qualify for an exemption from the work requirement.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the work requirement will be the largest source of Medicaid savings, reducing federal spending on the needy by $326 billion over 10 years and causing millions to become uninsured.
All told, the Big Ugly cuts roughly $1 trillion over the next decade from programs for which the main beneficiaries are the poor and working class, and gives about $1 trillion in tax benefits to the richest members of our society.
It is the most dramatic reversal of FDR’s moral test in American history.
In the face of this outrage, the shutdown is the only practical leverage Democrats have.
By the time of FDR’s Second Inaugural in 1937, most of the country was still ill-housed, ill-fed, and ill-clothed. Yet we were all in it together. The fortunes of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age had mostly been leveled by the Great Crash of 1929.
Perhaps it was easier under those circumstances to accept the idea that the test of our progress wasn’t whether we added more to the abundance of those who had much but provided enough for thosse who had too little.
Today, though, the moneyed interests lord it over America — exerting so much economic and political power that the nation is badly failing FDR’s test.
Last weekend, just as millions of low-income Americans were losing their food stamps, Trump threw a lush “Great Gatsby”-themed party at his Mar-a-Lago estate, replete with 1920s flappers and Gatsby-inspired music from the Roaring Twenties.
Some critics have called it “tone deaf,” but it was an accurate rendition of the tone Trump has set for America.
Trump is throwing a huge party for America’s wealthy — giving them tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks to ensure that their wealth (and support for him) continues to grow.
Meanwhile, he is throwing to poor and working-class Americans the red meat of hatefulness — hate of immigrants, people of color, the “deep state,” “socialists,” “communists,” transgender people, and Democrats.
This is the formula strongmen have used for a century — more wealth for the wealthy, more bigotry for the working-class and poor — until the entire facade crumbles under the weight of its own hypocrisy.
But yesterday, millions of American voters refused to go along with this unfairness. They repudiated, loudly and clearly, the formula Trump and his regime have used.
It is now the responsibility of all of us — whether Democrat or Republican or Independent; whether wealthy or middle class or working class or poor; whether conservative or progressive — to return the nation to a path that is morally sustainable.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.