An American President Against America

In a country that likes to see itself as the embodiment of the “American dream,” a simple table says more about the political present than a thousand speeches. It comes from the official 2023 SNAP annual report – the program that in the United States stands for food security for millions of families. Forty million people depend on it, including children, retirees, veterans, caregivers, and single parents. And yet this program has for months been systematically targeted by a government that has discovered hunger as a political weapon. Donald Trump speaks of “fraud,” of “illegals,” of “abuse of the system.” He claims that the state is being robbed, that the aid goes to “foreigners.” But the numbers do not lie. According to official data from the Food and Nutrition Service of the Department of Agriculture, 89.4 percent of SNAP recipients were born in the United States, another 6.2 percent were naturalized. Only 3.3 percent are not citizens. Even if refugees are included, the share of non-American beneficiaries remains below four percent. In other words, almost 95 percent of those receiving food assistance are not foreigners – they are America.

The chart shows with shocking clarity how far the political rhetoric of the Trump administration has drifted from reality. Nearly nine out of ten recipients of food assistance in the United States were born in the country. More precisely: 89.4 percent are U.S. citizens by birth, another 6.2 percent have acquired citizenship in the course of their lives. Only 1.1 percent of the recipients are recognized refugees, and 3.3 percent fall into other non-citizen categories.

These figures do not come from estimates or partisan analyses, but from official surveys of the Department of Agriculture for the 2023 fiscal year. They refute the myth that the SNAP program is “exploited by migrants” or burdens the state because of “foreigners.” In reality, the assistance reaches exactly those who need it most – the people who sustain this country: nursing aides, supermarket employees, nurses, veterans, families with children, and retirees.

More than 7.8 million SNAP recipients are over 60 years old – nearly one in five. Many of them live on a small pension, often after decades of work. The data therefore does not show a country of freeloaders, but a country that lets its own citizens go hungry. Around 89 percent of all distributed benefits flow directly to Americans who were born here, have worked here, and still live here. SNAP is not a foreign aid system but a safety net for the nation’s own population – the last one many of them still have.

These people are not marginal figures of a foreign system but the core of American society. They are workers, nurses, cashiers, bus drivers, retirees, and military families. They wear uniforms, pay taxes, get up early, and come home late. Many have worked until the factory closed or their bodies could no longer endure it. Some had to give up their homes because rent rose faster than wages. They do not live off America – they are America. And yet they are the ones Trump describes in his speeches as parasites, lazy, or freeloaders. The number 40 million is not abstract. It stands for people who each month must calculate between milk and bread at the supermarket checkout. For parents who explain to their children why they skip lunch. For elderly people who open canned food at Christmas. And while they count their dollars, the government cuts billions. The budget for SNAP is to be reduced by 30 percent next year. Those are real meals, real lives disappearing in the shadow of a political ideology that treats compassion as weakness and poverty as personal failure.

The cynicism lies not only in the cuts but in the language used to justify them. Trump speaks of “protecting taxpayers” – and means protecting the wealthy. He speaks of “personal responsibility” – and means submission. He speaks of “America first” – and lets the country go hungry. The government could, as previous administrations have done, draw on emergency funds to ensure supply. It does not. Instead, officials, aid organizations, and governors are being strung along as if this were a debate about principles, not about the next grocery basket. In October there was a judicial turning point that laid bare the core of the problem. Three federal courts – one in Rhode Island, one in Massachusetts – declared the Trump administration’s refusal to release about five billion dollars from SNAP’s emergency reserves unlawful. Judge John J. McConnell ruled that the White House must disburse the funds “timely, or as soon as possible” to prevent an impending catastrophe. His colleague Indira Talwani called the decision to stop food aid simply “unlawful.” She said she could not understand “how this is not an emergency when millions of people are losing their food.” Judge Beryl Howell (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia) joined them and likewise ordered the Department of Agriculture to take immediate steps to resume payments.

Trump let it be known through his spokespeople that the shutdown was “not an emergency.” At the same time, he declared publicly that he wanted to “help everybody” – and in the same breath described SNAP as a program that was “largely Democrats.” It was perhaps the most revealing moment in which social responsibility was labeled along party lines. In Trump’s logic, the needy are not citizens but Democrats – second-class people. This attitude has consequences that extend far beyond hunger. The state loses its neutrality when it makes the nourishment of its population dependent on party affiliation. A president who treats the poor of his country as enemies breaks with the principle that made him president in the first place: the oath of office to protect the American people from harm.

All the court rulings were more than mere judicial defeats – they were a moral slap in the face. They forced a government to give its own citizens what was already paid for. That it took judges to make that happen is the real scandal. Hunger was never a bargaining chip in a budget debate. Only now has it been made one. Economists have pointed out for years that every dollar invested in SNAP generates up to 1.7 dollars in economic return. The program supports supermarkets, farmers, and transporters – and it safeguards what is left of the nation’s social infrastructure. Yet the White House turned against the simplest of all equations: that no one wins when millions lose.

The government endangered not only the needy but also those it claimed to protect – farmers, shop owners, small grocery stores. Hunger is not a savings program but a boomerang. The consequences are already being felt. Some states tried to bridge the benefits on their own, others had to file lawsuits to put food on the tables of their residents. The Democratic attorney general of Massachusetts, Andrea Joy Campbell, said, “It is incomprehensible that our federal government forces us to fight for the nourishment of our citizens.”

What remains is the image of a country where judges must remind the government of humanity. Trump’s handling of SNAP was not an administrative error but a deliberate choice: hunger as leverage, poverty as a political weapon. A president who fights the poor of his own country fights the country itself. He wages war against those who feed him, who clean his streets, who care for his children, who harvest his fields. And he does it because they cannot defend themselves. The “war on poverty” that Lyndon B. Johnson once declared was an attempt to fulfill the promise of democracy. The war that Donald Trump is waging today is its opposite – a war against compassion, against facts, against America.

In the end, there remains the question that no statistic can answer: What is a country worth that lets its citizens go hungry to preserve a narrative? The answer lies between the lines of the table – in more than 40 million destinies that show how thin the line between pride and reality has become.