It's Time to Step Up

Trump Refuses to Feed 42 Million Americans. So We Will

Right now, as I write this, 42 million Americans are not receiving their November SNAP benefits.

Not because the money doesn’t exist. Not because of some technical glitch or administrative delay. But because Trump’s administration has decided,deliberately, consciously,not to use the $6 billion in contingency funds that sit there, available, specifically designated for emergencies like government shutdowns. The USDA has the money. They are simply refusing to spend it.

Tomorrow is November 1st. Tomorrow, millions of people will try to buy groceries and their cards will be declined. The system will say no. Insufficient funds. As though hunger were a budget reconciliation issue and not a deliberate choice to let people starve.

I am so angry I can barely see straight.

But here’s what makes it worse: this isn’t even the real fight. This shutdown crisis is just the preview. Because in July, Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” and buried inside it were $186 billion in SNAP cuts over the next decade. Not temporary. Not tied to shutdowns. Permanent reductions that will systematically push millions off food assistance through work requirements and eligibility restrictions that sound reasonable in press releases and devastating in practice.

This is the plan. First, show us what it feels like to go hungry during a shutdown. Then make it permanent policy. First the shock, then the normalization.

I keep thinking about the grocery store. Not the idea of it, not the abstraction, but the actual place: the way the air conditioning hits you like a wall when you walk in from the heat, the particular squeak of cart wheels on linoleum, the fluorescent lights that make everyone look a little sick, a little desperate. Tomorrow,tomorrow all of this takes on a different meaning. The grocery store becomes ground zero. The place where Trump’s policy becomes Trump’s body count.

I see it over and over in my mind: someone standing at the checkout with a cart full of food they carefully selected and calculated and planned for, and the card reader blinking red. Declined. The cashier’s face, the people waiting in line behind, the particular quality of shame that happens in public, in fluorescent light, with witnesses.

This is what Trump has engineered. This exact moment. This exact humiliation. Multiplied by millions.

And the babies. I keep thinking about the babies who need specialized formula,the hypoallergenic kinds, the ones for specific medical conditions,that cost fifty, sixty, seventy dollars a container. Formula that SNAP covered because without it, these infants cannot digest food, cannot grow, cannot survive. Right now, parents are standing in pharmacy aisles doing impossible math, trying to figure out how to afford the formula that keeps their baby alive. Trying to decide between the prescription or the formula. Between rent or the formula. These are not hypothetical babies. These are infants with metabolic disorders, with severe allergies, with conditions that require exact nutrition or they fail to thrive. That is the medical term: failure to thrive. And Trump’s policy,both the shutdown refusal and the long-term cuts,will engineer exactly that.

The stated justification for the July cuts was fraud prevention. Point-zero-three percent. That was the actual fraud rate they cited,less than half of one percent and they used it to justify cutting benefits to millions. The math does not math, as they say, but the math was never the point. The point was the message. The point was to establish, once and for all, that some lives matter and others do not, and if you are poor in Trump’s America, yours does not.

I know this not because I have studied it,though I have,but because I have seen it. In the checkout lines at the discount store on the east side where I sometimes shop. In the face of the man who counts out coins for a gallon of milk while the cashier waits, patient and tired. In the elementary school where volunteers pack weekend food bags for children who will not eat otherwise, whose small bodies are already learning what it means to be forgotten by the state. Hunger is not invisible. We have simply agreed, collectively, to look away.

But I am looking now.

What strikes me most is the precision of it, the almost mathematical quality of the harm. These are not accidents. These are not budget miscalculations or bureaucratic oversights. This is engineered scarcity in a country of obscene abundance. The shutdown is a choice,they have the contingency fund. The long-term cuts are a choice,they passed the legislation. Someone,many someones, in offices with good light and catered lunches,sat in meetings and decided that millions of people could afford to lose their one reliable source of food.

Trump himself likely spent less time on these decisions than he spends choosing which club to use on the seventh hole. This is what power looks like now: the ability to destroy lives without having to think about it, without having to see the consequences, without having to answer for any of it. He will never meet the mother who has to tell her children there is no food. He will never see the diabetic who can no longer afford both insulin and groceries. He will never stand in the food bank line that now stretches for blocks, filled with people who worked full-time jobs and still could not make it without SNAP.

He will never have to see what he has done.

And this, I think, is the core of it: this isn’t just about money or ideology. It’s about establishing hierarchy. About reminding people of their place. About demonstrating that power means the ability to make others suffer for no reason except that you can. Trump’s entire political project has been about humiliation,of immigrants, of women, of anyone who dares to need help or ask for dignity. The SNAP cuts and the shutdown refusal are simply the latest expressions of this impulse: the strong crushing the weak because that is what the strong do.

Acceptable to whom, I keep asking. Acceptable to whom.

I think of the rhetoric they use. “Personal responsibility.” “Self-sufficiency.” “Getting Americans back to work.” These words come so easily to men who have never stood in a food pantry line that stretches around the block, who have never done the arithmetic of survival: rent or groceries, medicine or heat, today or tomorrow. They speak about poverty as though it were a moral failure, a problem of character rather than circumstance. As though hunger were a teaching tool. As though deprivation were a virtue.

It is not a virtue. It is violence.

Democratic states are suing right now, arguing that the administration can and should use the appropriations available to them. But we cannot wait for courts. We cannot wait for the shutdown to end and hope the benefits come through retroactively. We cannot wait for the next election or the next lawsuit or the next moment when someone in power decides to show mercy.

Because here’s what I’ve learned: mercy doesn’t come from people like Trump. It comes from us.

This Is Where We Step Up

Trump may think he has won something. He may believe that refusing to release emergency funds and signing permanent cuts demonstrates power. But what he has actually done is show us exactly who we are dealing with,and in doing so, he has freed us from any remaining illusion that we can work within their system.

They think this is their victory. They think we will scatter, demoralize, disappear into our private desperation. They are counting on our isolation, our exhaustion, our willingness to accept that this is just how things are now.

They have miscalculated badly.

What they cannot see,what men like Trump have never been able to see,is that cruelty of this magnitude does not break people. It clarifies them. It burns away everything except what matters. And what matters is this: we will not let each other starve.

Right now, all across this country, something is happening. Something they didn’t plan for. Something they can’t legislate away.

People are organizing.

In Philadelphia, a network of mutual aid groups is coordinating emergency food distribution for the 900,000 residents who depend on SNAP. In Detroit, community organizers are mapping every household that will be impacted and building neighborhood response teams. In Los Angeles, restaurant workers are pledging to feed anyone who comes to their door, no questions asked. In rural Kentucky, church networks are pooling resources to make sure no one in their counties goes hungry, regardless of what Washington does or doesn’t do.

This is happening everywhere. In cities and small towns, in red states and blue states, in communities that have been abandoned by the government for so long they’ve already learned how to survive without it.

And this is just the beginning.

We are building mutual aid networks that run on trust instead of bureaucracy. We are building community kitchens that feed anyone who shows up. We are building food co-ops where people can access fresh produce at cost. We are building gardens in vacant lots, teaching people to grow food, creating seed libraries and tool shares and knowledge networks. We are building the infrastructure of survival that exists entirely outside their control.

This is not charity. This is insurgency.

Because what they cannot afford is for us to take care of each other. What threatens them most is the possibility that we might build something that does not require their permission, that does not depend on their largesse, that exists entirely outside their control. They need us isolated, competing, afraid. They need us to believe that there is not enough, that we must fight each other for scraps, that survival is a zero-sum game.

But we know better. We’ve always known better.

I have seen what happens when people decide they will not wait for the government to save them. During the pandemic, during hurricanes, during every crisis that exposes how thin the safety net has always been,people show up. They organize. They feed each other. They prove, again and again, that we are capable of more care than the system will ever provide.

And we’re getting better at it. Smarter. More organized. More strategic.

The mutual aid networks forming right now are not just emergency responses. They’re permanent infrastructure. They’re systems designed to outlast this administration, this crisis, this entire model of governance that treats hunger as acceptable collateral damage.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Food shares where neighbors pool resources to buy in bulk, cutting costs and creating abundance. Community fridges stocked by whoever has extra, accessed by whoever needs it, no paperwork required. Meal trains that don’t just respond to individual crises but run continuously, ensuring that everyone in the network eats. Garden collectives that transform vacant lots into productive land, teaching skills and building food sovereignty. Restaurant partnerships where businesses commit to feeding anyone who comes in hungry, funded by customers who can afford to pay extra.

Neighborhood pods of 10-15 households that commit to checking on each other daily, sharing resources, making sure no one falls through the cracks. Skills exchanges where someone who can cook trades with someone who can fix things, who trades with someone who can teach, building webs of reciprocity that make everyone more resilient. Emergency funds pooled from small monthly contributions, available instantly to anyone in the network who faces a crisis.

This is what terrifies them. Not our anger,they can handle anger. Not our protests,they’ve built systems to contain protests. What terrifies them is our competence. Our ability to organize. Our willingness to create the systems they refuse to provide.

They wanted to teach us that we are powerless. What they have actually taught us is that their power depends entirely on our compliance. And we are done complying.

The Terror of Our Solidarity

Trump and people like him understand only dominance and submission. They think that because they can refuse to release emergency funds, because they can sign legislation cutting benefits, they can take away our ability to care for one another. They think that because they control the government, they control what is possible.

They are wrong.

What we are building now will fill their hearts with terror. Not because we are threatening violence, but because we are making them irrelevant. Every mutual aid network is a declaration that we do not need their permission to survive. Every community kitchen is proof that we can create abundance without their bureaucracy. Every neighborhood pod is evidence that solidarity is stronger than any policy they can devise.

They will look at what we are creating and understand, finally, that they have lost. Not lost an election. Not lost a news cycle. Lost the battle for what kind of country this will be.

Because while they were blocking emergency funds, we were organizing food distributions. While they were signing permanent cuts, we were building permanent networks of care. While they were performing cruelty from podiums, we were showing up for our neighbors with groceries, with meals, with the simple revolutionary act of making sure no one goes hungry on our watch.

The terror we are building is the terror of our solidarity. The terror of a movement that does not need their permission, does not depend on their budget allocations, does not wait for their approval. The terror of people who have decided that survival is not negotiable and that we will create the systems they refuse to provide.

When the food banks they have overwhelmed start to fail, our networks will be there. When families run out of options, our networks will be there. When the crisis they have engineered reaches its peak, we will be there,not because any government told us to, but because we decided that this is what it means to be human.

And here’s what makes this truly powerful: we’re not just responding to this crisis. We’re building something that will outlast it. Something that will still be here when Trump is gone, when the next crisis hits, when the next administration decides that some people are expendable.

We are building the infrastructure of the world we want to live in. A world where everyone eats. Where care is abundant. Where no one has to beg permission to survive. Where solidarity is not a slogan but a daily practice.

This is how we win. Not by beating them at their game, but by refusing to play it. Not by appealing to their conscience,they have none,but by making their cruelty irrelevant. Not by waiting for salvation from above, but by saving each other.

Join Us

If you are reading this and you want to be part of what’s coming, here’s what you do:

Find the mutual aid network in your area. If there isn’t one, start one. It’s easier than you think. Begin with your block, your building, your church, your union hall. Start with five households. Make a group chat. Check in daily. Share what you have. Ask what people need. Build from there.

Connect with local food banks and let them know you can help distribute. Volunteer at community kitchens. Join or start a community garden. Put a community fridge on your porch. Leave groceries for neighbors anonymously. Pay for the person behind you in line. These small acts compound. They create culture. They build the world we need.

If you have resources, fund the organizations doing this work. If you have skills, offer them. If you have time, show up. If you have none of these things, you still have value,your presence matters, your story matters, your willingness to be part of something larger than yourself matters.

This is not a movement that requires perfection. It requires participation. It requires showing up, even when it’s hard, even when you’re tired, even when it feels like nothing you do will be enough. Because it is enough. Every meal shared is enough. Every neighbor checked on is enough. Every act of solidarity is enough.

We are building this together. Not because we are saints or heroes, but because we are human beings who refuse to accept that hunger is inevitable in a country this wealthy. We refuse to accept that the government’s failure is the end of the story. We refuse to accept that Trump and people like him get to decide who eats and who doesn’t.

We are writing a different ending.

What Comes Next

I don’t know when the shutdown will end or when the November benefits will be distributed retroactively,if they will be. I don’t know how the lawsuit will turn out or what the courts will decide. I don’t know how the $186 billion in cuts will be implemented over the next decade or how many millions will lose access to food assistance.

But I know this: we will survive it. Not because of them, but in spite of them. Not because the system works, but because we are building something outside the system. Not because anyone saved us, but because we saved each other.

And when we do,when we look back on this moment,we will remember what they did. We will remember that Trump had $6 billion in emergency funds and refused to use it. We will remember that he signed legislation that will cut nearly $200 billion from food assistance. We will remember who stood by and who stood up.

But more importantly, we will remember what we built. The networks that sustained us. The neighbors who showed up. The meals shared, the gardens planted, the solidarity practiced. We will remember that when the government abandoned us, we did not abandon each other.

This is the America they don’t want us to see. The America of survival, of mutual aid, of people who refuse to be broken. The America that steps up when the system fails. The America that builds something better in the ruins of what came before.

Trump may think he has beaten us. He may think that blocking emergency funds and signing permanent cuts demonstrates dominance. But what he has actually done is wake us up. He has shown us exactly how little we can depend on government, how much we can depend on each other, and how powerful we become when we organize.

So yes, I’m furious. I’m sickened. But I’m also more certain than I’ve ever been.

We are the only safety net left.

And we’re enough.

We’re more than enough.

We are building something that will outlast him, outgrow him, and ultimately make him irrelevant. We are building the world where hunger is impossible because we have decided, collectively, that no one eats until everyone eats.

This is our moment. This is our fight. This is our country now.

It’s time to step up.

This work takes time. It takes research, reporting, and the kind of sustained attention that cannot be done between breaking news alerts. If you believe in independent writing that refuses to look away, that names power and imagines what comes after it, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Paid subscribers make it possible for me to keep doing this work,to investigate, to document, to bear witness to what is happening and to point toward what we can build instead. Your support means I can spend time in the archives and on the ground, talking to organizers and tracking policy, instead of chasing clicks or softening edges to please algorithms.

If this piece moved you, if it clarified something, if it made you feel less alone in your anger and your resolve,subscribe. Let’s build this together.