This Week's Trump Outrages: Portraits in Cruelty

By Mort Kondracke


Donald Trump deserves every possible negative adjective applied to him: corrupt, dishonest, narcissistic, authoritarian, foul-mouthed, unfaithful, divisive, bigoted, criminal, vindictive, violent. I invite readers to add to the list. But after Trump shredded one popular social program after another, the word that’s in widest circulation right now is “cruel.”

Trump is willing to fund ICE and expand the Border Patrol (deemed more aggressive than ICE) to continue roughing up, rounding up and deporting undocumented immigrants (and some US citizens). He’s also found money to assist the right-wing president of Argentina, Javier Milei. His One Big Beautiful Bill gave 60% of tax cut benefits to persons with more than $217,000 in yearly income, the top 20% of taxpayers.

But Trump is willing to see 42 million low-income Americans go hungry (that’s one out of every eight citizens, including 16 million children, a disgrace in the richest country in the world). Two federal judges ordered the Department of Agriculture to release Supplemental Nutriton (SNAP) funding, but the department planned to release only 50% of the money to the states.

The Chief Judge of the federal court of Rhode Island, John McConnell, ordered USDA to release 100% but his ruling was stayed by the US Supreme Court after Trump appealed. After the Court’s ruling, USDA ordered that any state delivering 100% of benefits had to “immediately undo” the action or face a cutoff of future benefits. Mercifully, legislation to get the government open again includes funding for SNAP—at what level is unclear. But Trump had absolutely nothing to do with saving the program.

https://www.postalley.org/2025/11/11/this-weeks-trump-outrages-portraits-in-cruelty/