I think the most important thing I’ve learned in these early days of Trump’s second term is that I never want to be a person like him.
Actually, I would rather be dead than to be anything like him.
He is the most cruel person ever to serve as President, shaming the office he holds and bringing shame to our nation for electing him not just once, but twice.
It doesn’t matter if he knows how awful a man he is. Nor does it matter if some Americans think he’s a great guy, a great president, a great whatever. He isn’t and never will be.
His morals are so stunningly low that he is among the few individuals ever to live who can be legitimately described as being amoral, that is, someone without any sense of right and wrong.
It’s quite stunning when you think about it. We have a president for whom right and wrong play no role in his decision-making whatsoever.
His callous attitude about withholding funding for the SNAP program (Food Stamps) starting this Saturday because of the government shutdown is a case in point.
Some 40 million plus Americans depend on SNAP to supplement their food needs. The benefits are delivered through the use of what is called an EBT card (electronic benefits transfer) that recipients use when they go to the grocery store.
Cutting off SNAP funding means individuals and families will either go without food or give up something else such as medications in order to have money to buy food.
That’s the America Trump and his Republicans in Congress want because they believe anyone who receives SNAP benefits is someone who wouldn’t need help in the first place if they were willing to work like everybody else.
Take a look at the people they’re talking about. To qualify for SNAP benefits, the annual net income per household (regardless of the number) cannot exceed $25,864, which amounts to a monthly income of $2,155.33.
Know anybody who lives on that amount of income? Yea, neither do I.
But there’s more to the story. 40% of SNAP beneficiaries are children; 18% are elderly; 11% are disabled; and 74% of the 41% who are able to work actually do, according to studies done measuring the program’s effectiveness on a yearly rather than a monthly basis.
In addition, on average SNAP amounts to only 1.5% of government spending annually. What is more, contrary to what Trump and Republicans are saying, the SNAP program is not running out of money. Just the opposite. It has some 5 billion dollars in contingency funds the Department of Agriculture that runs the program has at its disposal for emergencies such as a government shutdown.
One more thing you may not know. The largest share of SNAP benefits go to predominantly white rural communities in red states, not urban areas. In point of fact, Republican voters make-up the largest group of Americans who receive SNAP assistance.
Now contrast the SNAP program to the farm subsidies the federal government pays out annually. Started in 1933 as part of President Roosevelt’s efforts to bring the nation out of the Great Depression, farm subsidies are extra payments to farmers in exchange for producing (or not producing) certain commodity crops.
Today those products include wheat, cotton, field corn, swine, rice, tobacco, and milk. The subsidy amounts vary yearly based on crop surpluses and shortages. In 2024 the total was over $9 billion. The projection for 2025 is some $30 billion.
Of course, Trump doesn’t actually care about farmers, just as he doesn’t care about SNAP recipients, even though both tend to vote Republican. At the moment they serve his interests better as a political tool to use against Democrats.
Farmers are paying the price with lower personal income. SNAP recipients are paying the price by going without food.
That his actions are cruel and totally unnecessary doesn’t cross Trump’s mind. After all, within the first weeks of his second term he shutdown the USAID program that was feeding the victims of famine stricken Sudan, South Sudan, and Mali. Putting the lives of the poorest of the poor here at home at risk of going hungry fits perfectly into his amoral decision making.
I cannot even imagine what it would be like not to have a moral conscience, not to feel any compassion or sympathy for anyone, to make decisions based solely on how they affect you and no one else.
This is why when people say that the cruelty is the point of whatever Trump does they are exactly right. Amoral people come across as cruel because they are. They’re too small to be anything else.
I once heard the great preacher and moral leader, William Sloane Coffin, say something that perfectly captures who Trump is. He said that a man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package.
Donald Trump is a very small package of a human being, and now more than 40 million Americans, including millions of children, are about to find out just how devastating the impact of a decision made by somebody like that can be.
The choice Trump is forcing not only on Democrats, but on the nation is between food and healthcare. Open the government and people will get SNAP benefits, but in the process they will lose their healthcare.
Food or healthcare. That’s the Trumpian choice. Making matters worse, he is now lying about it, claiming the law prevents him from using the Agriculture Department’s surplus funding during the shutdown.
It doesn’t, but this is the America unleashed in last year’s election. Honestly, it is an America that makes me feel nauseated, disgusted, ashamed. It’s an America that is the inevitable by-product of the presidency of a man who has no sense of what is right and wrong.
Which brings me full circle to where I began. I would rather be dead than to be a person like Trump. Worse, our nation will be dead if we become like him.
That’s what the current resistance movement is about, refusing to allow Trump to make the nation into a collective extension of himself. After the 2026 mid-term elections, we will move into a pro-active movement to impeach and convict Trump (more about that in the coming months).
For the moment, then, our task is to resist and reject any obvious temptation or subtle slide toward becoming a nation like Trump.
We have always been a nation morally bigger than the small package of an amoral man he is.
It is up to us to keep it that way.
linnposts.com 