Using the government shutdown as an excuse and an opportunity, the fascist Trump regime is freezing food stamps (what are called SNAP—Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—benefits)—leaving millions hungry. This is in spite of the fact that there is reserve emergency funding set aside that the Trump regime has refused to use.
One in five children in the U.S. receive food stamps, and one in eight adults. This means many hungry people will be forced to seek food assistance through churches, food pantries, and community organizations. This is not by accident—but exactly part of the point, and the larger fascist strategy.
Project 2025, the fascist blueprint that the Trump regime is systematically putting into place, laid out a plan for shredding the entire "social safety net,” which included major cuts on SNAP, Medicaid, and Head Start programs that provide funding for preschool programs for low-income children—all the ways that poor people rely on the government for some meager assistance. This is a major part of the radical remaking of society on an openly white supremacist, patriarchal and theocratic foundation envisioned by the Christian fascist forces at the heart of Trump/MAGA fascism.
In an insightful academic paper titled Project 2025 and the Religious Hijacking of the Social Safety Net: An Analysis of Theological Governance and Implications for Social Work Practice, social worker Savannah Hinde-Seeley wrote:
[Project 2025] represents a profound ideological shift. Poverty is reinterpreted not as a structural failure but as an individual moral and spiritual deficiency. The proposal’s cuts are not arbitrary—they are deeply informed by a theological worldview that spiritualizes scarcity, disciplines dependence, and exalts self-reliance as a form of righteousness.
In California, Guatemalan mom purchases fresh fruits for her children with last of her SNAP benefits, October 31, 2025.
The Trump fascist regime is working to break the expectation that there will be some kind of assistance—as meager as it is—when people are in desperate need. Instead, they are seeking to foster a much more openly cruel and cold-hearted system—with the church and the "nuclear family" as the only place people can find support.
In addition, these fascists are working to put into place unlimited executive power over federal spending. To Trump and MAGA fascism, the current shutdown is an “unprecedented opportunity” to make deeper cuts to federal jobs and desperately needed federal programs that “don’t align with the administration’s values.”
On October 31, just hours before the fascist Trump regime was going to allow SNAP benefits to expire, two federal courts found that the administration had acted unlawfully in refusing to use the emergency funding. One of the federal judges ordered the Trump regime to distribute the funds “as soon as possible.” Trump answered that he is “seeking clarity” on the rulings, claiming that he cannot use the funds set aside for emergencies to continue the SNAP benefits.
The judge said in making his ruling, “There is no doubt, and it is beyond argument, that irreparable harm will begin to occur if it hasn’t already occurred in the terror it has caused some people about the availability of funding for food for their family.” The other judge said; “Congress has put money in an emergency fund…it’s hard for me to understand how this isn’t an emergency, when there’s no money and a lot of people needing their SNAP benefits.”
Right now, even if the rulings are enforced, it is not clear if or when people would actually receive their food stamps, or whether there will be a reduction in the amount they receive. A decrease is likely given that the emergency funds allow for only partial benefits, and those funds will run out if the government shutdown continues.
In 2021, the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian described the larger fascist program this way:
The Republicans have become a fascist party—a party based on open and aggressive white supremacy, male supremacy and other oppressive relations—a party convinced that only it deserves to rule, moving to manipulate elections and suppress votes in order to gain and hold onto power, refusing to accept the outcome of elections it does not win, determined to gut and pervert “the rule of law,” trample on people’s rights, and adopt what amounts to an undisguised capitalist dictatorship, ready to use violence not only against masses of people but also against its rivals in the ruling class.
These Republicans have mobilized a significant section of people who believe, with an intense, irrational passion, that white supremacy, male supremacy, and other oppressive relations (as well as unrestrained plunder of the environment) must be firmly upheld and enforced. They have been driven to a state of vicious insanity, embracing all kinds of lunatic conspiracy theories, along with a crazed Christian fundamentalism, as a response to the threat they see to their entitled (or “god-ordained”) position and their insistence that further concessions to the struggle against oppression will destroy what has “made America great.”
Every day, and in a thousand ways, the reality screams out that there is no living together with this fascist lunacy—and no one should want to! There is no way that any decent person should want to live in the society, and world, that these fascists are determined, that they are willing to kill, to bring into being.
