President Donald Trump really doesn’t want poor people to eat.
An appeals court on Monday ruled that even though the government is shut down, Trump and his administration have to pay out Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits—better known as food stamps—to the over 40 million Americans who rely on the program to feed themselves and their families.
But Trump immediately notified the Supreme Court that it would be filing an appeal, hoping to stop benefits from going out to hungry people until the government reopens, which is expected to happen soon.
That comes after the Trump administration told states over the weekend that they had to reverse any attempts to fund SNAP benefits or else risk adverse consequences.
“To the extent States sent full SNAP payment files for November 2025, this was unauthorized. Accordingly, States must immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits for November 2025,” Patrick A. Penn, a deputy undersecretary of the Agriculture Department, wrote in a memo to states. “Failure to comply with this memorandum may result in USDA taking various actions, including cancellation of the Federal share of State administrative costs and holding States liable for any overissuances that result from the noncompliance.”
Obstinately refusing to pay out food stamps is so evil it’s hard to put into words.
“Trump is doing this because he is a bad person,” Rep. Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, said at a press conference last week when Trump was fighting court orders to pay SNAP benefits. “He’s weaponizing hunger and trying to rip food away from more than 40 million Americans, including 16 million children, for sadistic political leverage. How dare he?”
It’s also politically idiotic.
The courts had given Trump a good out when they ordered him to pay food stamp benefits.
Trump appealing those rulings because he didn’t want to pay SNAP benefits makes him directly responsible for millions of people going hungry—including millions of Trump’s own voters who rely on food stamps.
And it seems the public agrees. Trump’s approval rating has declined dramatically since he began to hold poor people hostage by refusing to fund food stamps until the government reopened.
“It seems very likely that threatening SNAP benefits was the primary cause of the big downshift in Trump’s approval ratings beginning ~3 weeks ago,” polling analyst Nate Silver wrote, referring to the date when Trump’s secretary of agriculture announced the administration would not be funding food stamp benefits during the shutdown.
Trump’s approval rating now stands at a dismal 40.2%, according to FiftyPlusOne’s polling average.
That’s about a 2-percentage-point decline since early October, and such high disapproval of Trump’s agenda could cause an electoral wipeout for Republicans next November—as it did last week in a spate of off-year elections in New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and California.
“The Oligarchs Never Change,” progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont wrote in a post on X. “Marie-Antoinette: Let Them Eat Cake. Donald Trump: Let Them Starve.”
