Some days it seems to me that when Trump gets ‘in the mood’ Viagra doesn’t do the trick so he resorts to cruelty to…’prepare.’ Poor people, and farmers (unless they are major agribusiness) are favorite targets and today we learn he made himself a twofer. He’s frozen out a billion dollars in aid to low-income families and programs that provide lunch and breakfast to poor kids at school, AND local farmers who provide said food! Now that folks is some serious cruelty, but Trumpty and conservatives in general get their rocks off over kicking people who are down and can’t fight back!
As this article from The Independent tells us Trump (to paraphrase a line from Blazing Saddles) “Don’t need no stinking DOGE’ to find something to cut. He hates people who aren’t rich. (Especially those with money who don’t give wads of it to him!) and local farmers and low income people aren’t able to fund conservative causes in general. And don’t buy every piece of Trump branded crap they can off his website. The fact that this has a huge, negative impact on kids? Trump says ‘So what? They were born to LOSERS and therefore will be LOSERS all their lives so f**k em.’ That’s how Trump thinks.
The fact that with the stroke of a Sharpie he can make people, especially KIDS hungry give Trumpty the warm fuzzies. So he’s gone and done it:
The Department of Agriculture has slashed over $1 billion in funding aimed at helping schools and food banks purchase from local farmers, according to a nonprofit.
“Multiple states” were recently notified of these cuts, the nonprofit School Nutrition Association said in a statement Tuesday.
Meanwhile, even though it’s well documented that kids with full stomachs do better in school Trump wants them to starve. If he can screw over local farmers in the process and force them into selling out to Agribusiness so much the better. Hence the ‘twofer’ I mentioned earlier. Worse is that conservatives including regular folks ones are fine and dandy with this. They thump their chests about being ‘super Christian’ and reject their BT (Before Trump) Savior’s mandate to help the less fortunate. I think of The Sermon On The Mount at times like this. The bible conservative “Christians” profess to revere talk about this event. How given a few loaves of bread and fishes Jesus blessed the food and his disciples distributed to the multitudes. Everyone was fed, and there were even baskets full of food left over!
Trump, who has replaced Jesus with GOP Christians would have looked at those few loaves of bread and few fish and said “This is MINE. If you’re hungry too f**king bad you losers. Go get your own food, and make sure you give a good part of whatever you get to ME or I’ll make sure there’s hell to pay for you!” That however is where things stand in the era of Trump and Trumpism/MAGA. Worse, we are talking about a bona fide cult leader. An awful lot of Trump voters are low-income, working class WHITE folks inhabiting wide swaths of rural/small town “Real American.” Their own kids get a lot of those free school breakfasts and lunches. In fact, that school food is their best source of nutrition:
“With research showing school meals are the healthiest meals Americans eat, Congress needs to invest in underfunded school meal programs rather than cut services critical to student achievement and health,” said the group’s president Shannon Gleave. “These proposals would cause millions of children to lose access to free school meals at a time when working families are struggling with rising food costs. Meanwhile, short-staffed school nutrition teams, striving to improve menus and expand scratch-cooking, would be saddled with time-consuming and costly paperwork created by new government inefficiencies.”
However in the CULT of MAGA standing idly by as your children go hungry is part of being a member of Trump’s cult. One wonders how many of them feel guilty? For damned sure Trump and conservatives with power don’t feel one bit of guilt. Poor people are there to be punished for being poor. And their kids? The little bastards deserve punishment for being born to poor people! Not even easing hunger with their own children overrides the desire of MAGAs to ‘own the liberals.’ However that’s the America we are all stuck living in right now. Knowing it’s going to get worse before we can one day, hopefully make it better flat-out sucks.
What we CAN do is raise hell with elected officials from the state to the federal level. I find one or more reasons to do so every damned day. I know they are sick and tired of me contacting them to raise hell. I DON’T CARE how sick and tired they are of hearing me rip on them. Neither should you. We’ve seen that sometimes it works. This is yet another matter on which those people in power need to know we are paying attention. That it’s the kind of thing we’ll not only remember, but remind others about when election season rolls around. So much damage is being done it’s hard to know where to focus. But we can’t let the fact there are so many problems to address paralyze us.
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Making the rich richer by and while making the poor poorer is how and why the guillotine was invented.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
George Santayana 1905
I suggest Trump’s regime minions take a good look at 17th century France.
These people should not be called (or allowed to call themselves) pro-life. They are Pro-Pregnancy. They support programs for pregnant women, but not for the mothers and born babies—-and they are actively cutting those now.
They are doing what George Carlin called them out on: (paraphrase) They want live babies to make dead soldiers.
We are going to require a more educated work.force to compete with China. American businesses know that. He hasn’t the intelligence to recognize that.