Trump, Musk and the GOP may not hate struggling American families but they are hurting them | Opinion

I don’t know if Donald Trump, Elon Musk and congressional Republicans hate the poor, or just don’t care about them. The distinction matters little. What matters is what’s happening to farmers throughout the country, and the poor people they help feed.

In yet another blow to low-income Americans, the United States Department of Agriculture is canceling $1 billion that made food purchase programs possible, jeopardizing food banks and schools that have been able to feed poor kids with the fresh food that farmers produced. This list includes seven food banks in North Carolina that have fed families during a period of stubbornly-high inflation, much-discussed elevated egg prices, and increasing levels of hunger.

It comes as the stock market has been roiled by the chaos of Trump’s erratic, unnecessary tariff wars, and as companies that service the poor are reporting changes in consumer behavior.

“Our customers continue to report that their financial situation has worsened over the last year as they have been negatively impacted by ongoing inflation,” Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said during a recent earnings call. “Many of our customers report that (they) only have enough money for basic essentials, with some noting that they have had to sacrifice even on the necessities.”

The $1 billion in cuts compound the effects of a decision by Senate Republicans late last year to block an extension of a child tax credit policy that had lifted millions of American kids out of poverty. Nearly every Republican senator, including Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, voted against it. They seemed to not care that the COVID-era policy had been one of the most effective child-poverty fighting tools in American history.

“They’ve lost me on the pay-for,” Tillis told the media at the time. “The child tax credit doesn’t have any of some of the basic requirements that we would want. It needs to go back in the oven and come out with our tax reform [in 2025].”

But the GOP hasn’t been focused on a reform package that would alleviate poverty since voters returned Trump to the White House and gave Republicans the Senate majority. Instead, they’ve been busy greasing the wheels for an extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts that will again be heavily weighted towards the wealthy, and essentially telling the poor and working class to suck it up.

Other Trump administration decisions might undermine Medicaid, threatening health care access for millions of vulnerable Americans. Even if the poor and working class receive a modest tax break from Trump, it would be offset by what they’d lose in entitlement programs, meaning low-income families would be “worse off” under Trump policies.

Though sad and frustrating, none of this is surprising.

This state of affairs wasn’t only predictable; it was predicted.

For all of the Democrats’ flaws — and they are legion — there is an enormous gulf between the policies preferred by those on the left flank of the Democratic Party and the right flank of the Republican Party. Liberal Democrats are in favor of an enhanced safety net for the poor, the working class and the middle class. Conservative Republicans would consider trying to balance the nation’s budget on the backs of the poor by cutting Medicaid and SNAP benefits.

And yet nearly half of Americans bought into the idea in the last election that Trump would be good for the economy and the downtrodden. He hasn’t been. He won’t be.

During his first term, he tried to strip health care from millions of Americans while repeatedly promising a replacement plan that has yet to materialize nearly a decade later. There was little reason to believe he would have been better a second time around.

Yet here we are, with Trump’s topsy-turvy behavior undermining an economy which had been experiencing the best post-pandemic recovery of any country, and with Musk — a man who has received billions of taxpayer dollars to build his companies — high-handedly cutting jobs that working-class and middle-class workers have long relied upon.

I don’t know if they hate or just don’t care about struggling American families.

I know they are hurting them.

This story was originally published March 20, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Trump, Musk and the GOP may not hate struggling American families but they are hurting them | Opinion."