Bulwark Takes - Tim Miller: Trump’s Hunger Crisis Hits His Own Voters

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Tim Miller joins MSNBC’s Deadline: White House to break down the Trump administration’s shocking decision to block emergency SNAP funds — a move that could leave millions without food assistance. Tim explains why this kind of cruelty isn’t just immoral, it’s bad politics. Watch Nicolle on MSNBC: https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house

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Shopify.com slash audio boom. Hey everybody. Tim Miller from the Bullwark here. I was on with Nicole yesterday talking about this impending crisis with the SNAP benefits, essentially starting this weekend, not going to be available because the Trump administration has decided that they're not going to use emergency funds to pay for food assistance. I think this is important just to be very clear about this.

We are talking about the Trump administration. They have made a choice. It has either been a choice out of callousness, out of tight belt tightening, or out of strategy to try to pressure the Democrats, whatever the reason. Maybe it's different for different people. The Trump administration has just made a decision on their own that they're okay with people not having food.

They're okay of people being not having access to the assistance. They need to get groceries, potentially food banks, not having the food available for the poor, for the working poor. And it's an insane choice for this administration. And I know just because like the shutdown debate gets a little complicated, right? Because you get into Senate procedure, right? like the Republicans control the House, Senate, and presidency, but on this type of bill, you need 60 votes. And so they either have to use the nuclear an option or break the filibuster, blah, blah, blah,

you know, like, it gets complicated. Like, the Democrats have some agency in this shutdown. When it comes to the not using emergency funds for food assistance, that is a decision that is being made solely by the Trump administration. And I played this video on the pod yesterday. But I want to put it one more time, Mallory McMorrow, who's running for Senate in Michigan, is in the state Senate right now, explaining this extremely clearly. Let's watch. There are years worth of funding available for the SNAP program, our tax dollars, that we have already paid to the federal government to facilitate this program and the Trump administration deleted this language from the website. site this morning. They are hiding the fact that not only is there more than enough funding

to pay these benefits that we have already paid our tax dollars into, but that there was contingency language to ensure that even in the event of a government shutdown, that snap would go uninterrupted. The Trump administration and the Republicans supporting him are you. using food as a political weapon. This is a choice. They chose to delete this language. They are choosing to force children to go hungry. We will not stand for that choice, and I encourage a yes vote.

I mean, there it is. They took it off the website. And meanwhile, you've got states, you're kind of running around trying to solve this. I mean, I've mentioned that my original website of Colorado is doing a patch. Even some red states are doing a patch. Even my current state, Louisiana, after ripping Jeff Landry is the worst governor in America yesterday, it's like no-worthy that at least he's different than some of the other red state governors that are just going to, they're leaving people out to dry here and saying basically you're boned if you're not going to get your snap money. Even red states like Louisiana are acting on this in large part because a lot of the people that receive snap assistance are Republicans, particularly in a state like Louisiana because our economy sucks so about. so you know this is just a real bind that trump is putting republican governors in he's putting and more importantly it's a bind that he's voluntarily putting americans in including a lot of

people to vote for him who need this assistance in order to have the groceries and the food that they're and their families need that their kids need and they're fucking over a lot of kids John Thune is in South, it's in South Dakota. It's like 70% I think of people on SNAP. So that money is going to families with kids. What do they do? It is just, it is an unbelievable stupid political policy. It is an unbelievably heartless policy.

And it's all on Trump in the Trump administration. So discusses a little bit more with Nicole Wallace with Alex Wagner on MSN. NBC yesterday. So stick around for that, but I didn't have a chance to, going to make this point as clearly as I wanted to about the Trump administration. So I wanted to follow up on that, give it to you guys, and we'll be back later for more. So Tim Miller, I know food stamps is like a 90s-era right-wing racist smear, but Snap, which is sort of the new, an ABT, this is food assistance, knows no partisan affiliation, if anything, it does. It does, disproportionately benefits households in Trump voting counties and districts.

And it feeds a whole lot of kids who don't have any responsibility for any of the political decisions that adults make. Yeah, it's this contradiction of Maga-Trumpism, right? Where Trump has done better with and worked for the votes of lower income, working-class folks of all races, but particularly working-class whites in red states in America. and the rhetoric has shifted a little bit from the McCain-Romney days to try to appeal to those folks, to say the least, but the policies are harmful to them. And this is just this snap, the expiration of SNAP or the fact that they're not going to continue funding SNAP during the shutdown beginning this weekend,

I think it's a most acute example of this, where, you know, if the party had fully switched to being a multi-racial, multi-eltic working class party like they pay lip service to, This would be an emergency right now. They'd be like our own voters are literally going to go hungry, beginning this weekend. You know, we need to service them. And meanwhile, Donald Trump's in China or in Korea getting a, you know, Burger King Happy Meal crown from the head of South Korea. And Congress isn't even in session, right? Like, they're not doing anything. And so I think that this is just a very, obviously it's a human catastrophe and tragedy if this doesn't get fixed the next couple of days.

but it also just is a very stark demonstration of just how this kind of maga populism is a lot of lip service and not a lot of action. And I think you're seeing it real time also in the states where, you know, in Colorado, Jared Pullis and some other states governors, mostly Democratic governors, are working to try to patch this right now. And in some of the red states, it's not going to get patched. I mean, Tim, we talk about the guardrails around Trump as the people who didn't let him do awful things. They also seem like the people who didn't let him do insanely stupid.

stupid things politically. Yeah, I don't, maybe it's because he's a lame duck, God willing. Maybe it's just because he has rid himself of all the savvy people around him. But, yeah, there is not a lot of interest in stopping Trump from harming his own political interests with the occasional tacit exception of Scott Bessent around the tariffs, just trying to, like, prevent the worse from happening, not trying to stop him from doing it at all because he's already done a ton of damage with the tariffs. And this all goes all the way back to Doge

and the slashing of a lot of the programs that were in place during the Biden administration. I mean, this snap crisis comes on top of. I remember, I forget exactly what the program was, but I was called by a local farmer here in Louisiana who did fresh foods, and you think that the Maha administration would want to continue the kind of fresh food funding for food banks.

That was slashed, like back in the spring. And so, like, their effort to grow lettuces for food banks here was cut. And so this recent food bank crisis also isn't coming out of nowhere. So we talk about a lot of things that are intractable, like the weaponization of the Department of Justice, the militarization of our cities, those seem like places where they're not a lot of checks. People starving in American states and cities represented by people that are in the MAGA coalition seems like something that will come to a head. Just play this out for me over the next few. days and weeks. Yeah, look, I mean,

over the next week, people are going to not get the money that they need to get food. And food banks aren't going to be able to satisfy the demand. And so senators and congressmen are getting calls for people who aren't usually necessarily engaged in politics or, you know, who cross party

lines. So this stuff absolutely is going to come to a head. I expect that you would think that the Republicans would feel like they finally need to come to the table on this shutdown sometime in the next week. And I, and I I think it's part of a broader issue where there's economic struggles right now across a lot of red America, especially in Iowa and farm country. And I do think the heat will turn up on this in a way that it doesn't maybe for our institutional norms. Being an American right now is kind of a wild ride.

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