By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent
America is being strangled by its own government. Forty million people who depend on food stamps to survive are about to lose them because Donald Trump decided that his personal power trip was more important than keeping the government open. The shutdown has cut deep, and this week, those cuts reach the dinner tables of the working poor.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, has always been a mirror to this nation’s soul. We give 40 million people food stamps because corporations refuse to pay a living wage. Most recipients work. They bag groceries, stock shelves, clean offices, and pour coffee for executives who earn more in a day than they will in a lifetime. But because the country’s biggest companies pay starvation wages, taxpayers are forced to step in. SNAP has become corporate welfare, a subsidy for greed. If those same corporations paid a living wage, that 40 million number would plummet. Yet the outrage is not over the imbalance of wealth or the rising cost of survival. Instead, it’s aimed at the people who need help just to feed their families. The question is why anyone would lose their mind over 40 million Americans having access to food, but not blink at the $40 billion Trump just sent to Argentina. Nobody wants to talk about that money.
Because legislators refuse to raise the minimum wage to a livable level, people are drowning. Rent is too high. Health insurance is skyrocketing. Home insurance premiums have doubled in some states. The working class is crushed under a system designed to make poverty permanent. It’s not getting better when career and hobby politicians—some who treat public office like a pastime—keep playing with the economy for personal gain. The president himself has turned governing into a hustle. He’s out here levying tariffs when he’s angry and playing insider trader when he’s not. The rich man’s talking points never change. Starbucks’ CEO made $95.8 million in salary last year. The average barista earns between $12,000 and $23,516 annually. Does that make any sense? Approximately 1.3 million workers earn the federal minimum wage, and 2.7 million earn below it. Those are the people Donald Trump has abandoned.
At the same time, Trump has seized control of the mainstream media. CNN’s CEO Mark Thompson reportedly told his staff to ease off coverage of Trump demolishing the East Wing of the White House to build his $300 million ballroom after a visit there. It’s a depressing spectacle watching major outlets obey a would-be dictator before he even demands it. If they won’t hold him accountable for corruption, the weaponization of the Justice Department, or the Epstein connections, what chance do Americans have for real truth?
Meanwhile, Trump continues to work very hard to make sure this nation will never again have free or fair elections. It sounds dramatic to people who avoid hearing his words, but the man keeps saying them himself. Trump doesn’t act like the President of the United States. He acts like a New York real estate huckster still hustling for the next sale, weighing in on every petty, meaningless issue that keeps his name in headlines. As one social media user put it, “Not one good word is ever uttered except in self-adulation. There are so many horrid people in America, in his opinion, it’s amazing that he abides living in such a godforsaken country. If it weren’t for the acolytes, he’d run away in a trice… Argentina, maybe?”
Another wrote, “With all these unhinged histrionics from the Mango Mussolini, I wonder when pawn shops will start being major holders in Treasury bonds?”
That’s where we are. A nation where people who work full-time can’t buy groceries, where corporate America hoards billions while blaming the poor for needing help, and where the president lives like a king and calls it patriotism. The USDA says the SNAP money is gone. Trump says it’s the Democrats’ fault. But the truth is simpler. The man in the White House would rather starve his own people than admit that his cruelty and corruption have bankrupted more than the Treasury. They’ve bankrupted the soul of this nation.
“This is cruelty, and it is deliberate,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro.