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food stamps
'Disgusting': Republicans Applaud as Trump Brags About Taking Food Aid From Millions
"His Big Ugly Bill ripped food away from hungry moms, kids, and seniors to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans," said one House Democrat.
Feb 25, 2026
US President Donald Trump received a standing ovation from Republican lawmakers and administration officials Tuesday night when he bragged during his State of the Union address about taking nutrition assistance from millions, which he euphemistically characterized as lifting people off food stamps.
"In one year, we have lifted 2.4 million Americans—a record—off of food stamps," Trump said during his nearly two-hour speech.
The Republican reconciliation package that Trump signed into law last summer included $187 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) over a 10-year period, the largest cuts to the program in US history.
Trump: "In one year, we have lifted 2.4 million Americans -- a record -- off of food stamps" (In other words, Republicans cut food stamps) pic.twitter.com/19EoNEUmPF
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 25, 2026
The Republican law includes reductions in federal nutrition funding for states—which administer SNAP—as well as expanded work requirements, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated would strip nutrition benefits from "roughly 2.4 million people in an average month" over the next decade.
As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted in a recent analysis, changes enacted by the Trump-GOP law mean that "for the first time in the 50-year history of the modern SNAP program, the federal government will no longer ensure that the lowest-income people, including children, older adults, veterans, and people with disabilities, in every state have access to the food assistance they need because states that refuse to pay the cost share could see the program end."
Shortly after Trump signed the Republican megabill into law, his administration canceled an annual US Department of Agriculture survey aimed at measuring food insecurity, undercutting efforts to track the impact of the unprecedented SNAP cuts. The USDA's final reports estimated that nearly 48 million people in the US faced food insecurity in 2024—including nearly one in five households with children.
"Trump says he 'lifted' millions off food stamps," Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-Colo.) wrote in response to the president's State of the Union remarks. "But what he really means is his Big Ugly Bill ripped food away from hungry moms, kids, and seniors to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. The lies are blatant and disgusting."
Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) denounced her Republican colleagues for their celebratory response to Trump's boast.
"They're applauding ripping food out of people’s mouths to fund their tax cuts for billionaires," McBride wrote on social media.
USDA data released ahead of Trump's speech shows that around 696,000 fewer people received SNAP benefits in November 2025 compared to the previous month.
Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst on the food assistance team at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted that "people haven’t been dropping off SNAP because they no longer need help."
"Economic conditions haven’t improved and groceries haven’t gotten more affordable," Bergh added. "They're losing basic food assistance because of policy choices. Allowing this trend to continue is also a policy choice."
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Make Sure Everyone Knows: This Destructive Bill Is the Trump Trash Fire
As the preeminent bully of our Times, TRUMP lusts to brand people and groups he dislikes with pejorative nicknames. It is time to return the Favor.
Jul 04, 2025
The narrow passage of the Trump-GOP 1,100-page bill that spells death, destruction, and deprivation to the American people—including MAGA voters and innocents abroad—should destroy the Trumpster Republicans in the 2026 congressional election.
However, by then it will be too late for poor American children facing President Donald Trump reducing the food stamp programs; the 15 million Americans being thrown off Medicaid; the damage to or the termination of many clean solar energy and wind energy sales; the body blow to electric car prospects; the young Americans benefitting from AmeriCorps, Job Corps, student loans, and VA medical benefits. The Trump cuts will also undermine housing assistance programs, Meals on Wheels, disability assistance programs, and Head Start. Millions of desperate humans overseas are already cut off suddenly from USAID medicine, food supplements, clean drinking water, and other lifesavers that cost a few dollars per life saved. Tens of thousands have already died. (See Nicholas Kristof’s articles: “Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True.” “White House Billionaires Take On the World’s Poorest Kids.”).
Why is Trump (Elon Musk is now vehemently against the bill) doing this to all the people—red states, blue states? Why is he opening the air and water pollution spigots; stoking the greenhouse gases of the oil, gas, coal infernos (“Drill Baby Drill”); damaging people’s health everywhere? Didn’t Trump constantly pledge to his voters last year the paradise, the prosperity, the peace touted in his MAGA—Make America Great Again rhetoric?
If the Democrats had a strategic sense, they would PUT THE TRUMP BRAND ON EVERY DAMAGING, CRUEL, VICIOUS IMPACT ON INNOCENT PEOPLE, CHILDREN, MOTHERS, AND FATHERS, AND THE ELDERLY.
Of course, he lied, fooled, flattered, and flummoxed enough voters. Sadly, the feeble corporate Democrats allowed Trump to gain the White House and achieve his real objective, which is MATA OR MAKE AMERICA TRUMP AGAIN.
As Mark Green and I, (See, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All,” 2020) together with scores of psychologists observing Trump over the years, described this failed gambling czar, airline owner, university owner, etc., as a dangerously unstable, egomaniacal, vengeful person fueled by daily lying and fantasies who promotes harmful policies supporting him and other corporate greedhounds.
Trump’s bellowing, snarling, false accusations and broken promises in thousands of tweets, utterances, phone calls, and speeches demonstrate that he is a fascist dictator, willing to issue illegal executive orders and dictates.
What are Trump’s goals?
First, he wants to use the White House as a massive business opportunity to make him and his family fabulously wealthy. He wants more tax escapes for the wealthy and giant corporations; privileged personal family investments in crypto-currency that he is now de-regulating; to sell memorabilia, including Bibles (he has violated 7 out of the 10 Commandments and never goes to Church); to cut profitable deals with rich Arab nations and billionaires looking for favorable treatment; and to freeze federal minimum wages and pull down worker rights all to feed his and his class warfare friends’ insatiable avarice!
Second, Trump wants VENGENCE—taking it out on critics, political opponents, prosecutors, and using immigrants as a mass media scapegoated diversion that whip his core MAGA loyalists into a constant frenzy. His pathological vengeance includes going after universities, law firms, mainstream media owners who are, respectively, studying, suing, or reporting his daily crimes, obstruction of justice, shredding of the Constitution, and federal statutes that may produce challenges to his tyranny, burgeoning police state, and physical threats to members of Congress, governors, and the surviving federal civil servants who dare challenge what Vice President JD Vance, before his ambitious conversion, called “America’s Hitler.”
Remember, how many times Trump has followed his lawless acts with the words “this is just the beginning.” This corporation, masquerading as a human being, has long said that “with Article II, I can do whatever I want as president,” now backed by the Supreme Courts’ June 2024 reckless and abdicatory decision (6 to 3) in Trump vs. U.S. immunizing presidents from criminal prosecution for their official acts (undefined). This is why, drunk with his own power, he can say, “I run the country and the world.”
Third, entrench and immunize the rule of the Super-rich, the Plutocracy—that Trump wants to and has to curry the favor of with unprecedented giveaways and sweetheart deals. Accordingly, he bloats the Pentagon budget beyond what the Generals asked for ($150 billion more in the BIG WRECKING AMERICA BILL just passed). He gives Wall Street and the Fossil Fuel corporations everything they want—no regulation, no prosecutions, massive tax cuts, and dangerous new technology without legal or ethical restraints, to even protect our children.
He fires the federal cops on the corporate crime beat, drops over 120 pending corporate prosecutions started under former President Joe Biden, fires federal agency Inspectors general who would have watchdogged his Administration, pushes out scientists and health specialists and weather experts whose work is to forewarn the people of oncoming natural disasters.
It is astonishing how much Trump gets away with. He and his cronies explain their cuts to just about every people-benefiting program, including firing 25,000 IRS staffers who service our calls or investigate complex corporate tax evasion. They claim, without details, that people cheat on their Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, and food programs. BUT THEY IGNORE MASSIVE CHEATING AND STEALING BY CORPORATE CROOKS FROM MEDICAID, MEDICARE, AND OTHER SAFETY NET PROGRAMS IN THE HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR. THEY PROTECT COMPARABLE SUMS OF CORPORATE SUBSIDIES THAT WERE UNTOUCHED BY TRUMP-MUSK AND ALLOW A VAST, WASTEFUL, UNAUDITED PENTAGON BUDGET TO GET BIGGER.
For example, a few days ago, Dan Diamond of The Washington Post reported a huge “Fraud Bust” by the government, started under Biden, an “alleged $10.6 billion fraud scheme” involving shell corporations, foreign and domestic thieves billing, in the names of hacked beneficiaries, Medicare for millions of urinary catheters, glucose monitors, and other supplies. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats in Congress recognized corporate crime, corporate subsidies, and corporate bloated contracts as the key factors in the infliction of the cruel treatment of the American people across the board. Without robust corporate law and order, corporate abuse knows no bounds.
The treachery and betrayal by Trump and his GOP ( “Gougers of People”) of the American people is unprecedented. It is only a matter of time before hundreds of millions of the American people will experience the pain and be exposed to the silent violence caused by Trump.
If the Democrats had a strategic sense, they would PUT THE TRUMP BRAND ON EVERY DAMAGING, CRUEL, VICIOUS IMPACT ON INNOCENT PEOPLE, CHILDREN, MOTHERS, AND FATHERS, AND THE ELDERLY. Scuttling budgets and preparations for pandemics and climate disasters should be labelled with TRUMP’S name. Huge rip-offs of consumers after Trump collapsed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s law enforcement should be labeled TRUMP’S RIP-OFFS. Increased child hunger and patients thrown off Medicaid should be acknowledged as “Brought to you by DONALD TRUMP.” And much more. Signs, billboards, and social media portrayals of the Trump carnage are urgently needed.
As the preeminent bully of our Times, TRUMP lusts to brand people and groups he dislikes with pejorative nicknames. It is time to return the Favor. TRUMP THE EVERYDAY WRECKING BALL OF AMERICA AND ITS CITIZENRY HAS TO GO!
(See, Civic Self-Respect by Ralph Nader, 2025.)
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Trump’s Big Ugly Bill Is Fascism in Writing
It establishes an anti-immigrant police state in America, replete with a standing army of ICE agents and a gulag of detention facilities, and it was passed by a narrow margin despite popular opinion.
Jul 03, 2025
President Donald Trump’s 940-page Big Ugly Bill was passed today by the House and is now on the way to the White House for Trump’s signature.
It is a disgrace. It takes more than $1 trillion out of Medicaid—leaving about 12 million Americans without insurance by 2034—and slashes Food Stamps, all to give a giant tax cut to wealthy Americans.
It establishes an anti-immigrant police state in America, replete with a standing army of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and a gulag of detention facilities that will transform ICE into the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the government.
The best analogy isn’t to Lyndon Johnson. It’s to the “strongmen” of the 1930s—Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Franco.
It will increase the already-bloated deficit by $3.4 trillion.
It’s also disgraceful because of how it came to be.
Trump was elected with only a plurality of American voters, not a majority. He eked out his win by a margin of only 1.5%.
His Big Ugly Bill squeaked by in the Senate by one vote, supplied by Vice President JD Vance, and by just two votes in the House. No Democrat in either chamber voted for it.
Polls show most Americans oppose it.
It was passed nevertheless—within an artificial deadline set by Trump—because of Trump’s total grip on the Republican Party.
Republican lawmakers feared that Trump would go after defectors with public attacks or endorsements of primary challengers.
They also feared withering blowback from conservative media, “MAGA” diehards, and Trump himself on social media.
After North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis announced his opposition to the bill, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Tillis is a talker and complainer, NOT A DOER! He’s even worse than Rand ‘Fauci’ Paul!”
Then Trump pledged to back a primary challenger to Tillis, and Tillis announced he would not seek reelection. Trump called that “good news,” and threatened primary challenges against other Republican fiscal conservatives standing in the way of the bill’s passage.
Other presidents in my lifetime have been able to summon majorities of lawmakers for unpopular causes—I think of Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—but none with the retributive threats, social media fury, and potentially violent base of supporters that Trump is now wielding.
Needless to say, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts made America more inclusive. Trump’s Big Ugly Bill makes America crueler.
The best analogy isn’t to Lyndon Johnson. It’s to the “strongmen” of the 1930s—Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Franco.
That such a regressive, dangerous, gargantuan, and unpopular piece of legislation could get through Congress shows how far Trump has dragged America into modern fascism.
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