Joseph Sabino Mistick: Trump continues to play hunger games

The international community, at least since World War II and most recently in a 2018 U.N. resolution, has condemned using food as a weapon in conflicts. But that has not stopped President Donald Trump from effectively denying SNAP benefits for 42 million Americans.

Trump posted on Truth Social this past Election Day that SNAP benefits — food stamps — “will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!”

No one can restore SNAP benefits more easily than Trump can — with a nod of the head and the stroke of a pen. But Trump is using the denial of food to squeeze congressional Democrats to vote for his budget.

That budget includes tax cuts for the super-rich that are funded by severe cuts to health care coverage for needy Americans. In other words, unless Democrats agree to deny American families health care, Trump will let those same families go hungry.

Trump’s threat came just days after he hosted an opulent “Great Gatsby” party at his luxury resort in Florida, where “Roaring ’20s” flappers danced for him and his fellow swells while tuxedoed waiters passed trays of fancy cocktails.

Next to the phrase “terrible optics” in the dictionary, there should now be a photo of Trump and his guests yukking it up as average Americans wonder how they are going to feed their children and pay their increased health insurance premiums.

Like so many of Trump’s obsessions — including his ongoing war on mail-in voting — this latest assault on working-class and poor families makes no political sense. The time has long passed since Republican President Ronald Reagan could blame Democrats for creating “welfare queens” who abused the system, along with all the racist stereotypes.

As Thomas Edsall recently wrote in The New York Times, some Republicans are now starting to take “the initiative in seeking to protect food stamps.” Trump may not get it, but at least some of his congressional supporters are starting to come around.

Citing the polling firm Fabrizio-­Lee, which does work for Trump and the Republicans, it turns out SNAP “is very popular across the partisan spectrum, and it would be political malfeasance to try to cut benefits for the program.”

Edsall concludes: “Given the way people have traditionally talked about these programs, one of the most striking things about government data on SNAP use is just how high the white share of food stamp recipients actually is.”

We are talking about red states here. According to Edsall, nearly 98% of the SNAP participants in West Virginia are white. In Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming, white SNAP recipients make up between 60% and 86% of the total recipients.

You may remember Missouri’s Republican Sen. Josh Hawley giving the raised fist of encouragement to the Jan. 6 protesters, only to be seen running from the mob like a scared rabbit when they invaded the Capitol.

Hawley recently sponsored the “Keep SNAP Funded Act of 2025,” which now has a nearly equal number of Republican and Democratic co-sponsors.

In a guest essay in the New York Times, Hawley wrote: “Love of neighbor is part of who we are. The Scripture’s injunction to ‘remember the poor’ is a principle Americans have lived by. It’s time Congress does the same.”

It doesn’t matter if Hawley is simply reading the political tea leaves or if he has experienced a St. Paul type of conversion — and a lightning bolt knocked him to the ground. He’s on the right track.