Volunteers pack boxes of food along an assembly line at the Food Bank of the Rockies Distribution Center, the largest food bank in the region, weeks into the continuing U.S. government shutdown, in Denver, Colorado, U.S. October 22, 2025. REUTERS/Mark Makela
When Donald Trump, during one of his campaign rallies, declared, "I love the poorly educated," that type of populist-right messaging was a radical departure from pre-MAGA conservatism. Republicans, for decades, praised the ultra-rich as "job creators" and "exceptionalists" while attacking recipients of public assistance — from food stamps, now the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) — as people who gamed the system.
Trump, now nine and one-half months into his second presidency, still paints himself as a populist. But Salon's Chauncey DeVega, in a biting article published on November 4, points to the interruption of SNAP benefits as a stark example of MAGA Republicans' indifference to hunger and poverty.
"Over the weekend," DeVega explains, "more than 42 million Americans did not receive their Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Tens of millions of children, the elderly, disabled and other vulnerable people now face a brutal fact: They don't have enough to eat…. Poverty and hunger are forms of structural violence that stunt lives, limit upward social mobility and raise the odds that a hungry child will one day end up in prison. They cause a range of physical, emotional and psychological harm, including shortened lives and death."
"Poverty," DeVega laments, is a "public police choice" — and MAGA Republicans, he says, are choosing to promote "poverty" as well as "hunger."
"Beneath the fact of poverty in America lies something even more ominous: the ideology of necropolitics," DeVega argues. "In necropolitics, governance is primarily viewed through a Social Darwinist lens of survival of the fittest, where certain populations and groups are deemed disposable by the punitive and punishing state. The attempts to cut off SNAP benefits and other assistance for marginalized and vulnerable people, along with an historic government shutdown that is causing economic misery for millions, reinforce how necropolitics is the dominant strain of Trump's political ideology…. The left, along with traditional Never Trump conservatives, often have a difficult time understanding, never mind accepting, that MAGA is animated by necropolitics and a general disregard for the common good and universal human rights that are foundational for democracy and a humane society. But this is the bleak reality of the Trumpian Gilded Age."
Chauncey DeVega's full article for Salon is available at this link.