Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has canceled House business again next week, meaning that over the last 17 weeks, the House of Representatives will have worked on Capitol Hill for just 20 days. It also means that the House will not be back at work before November 1, when at least twenty-five states have said they will not be able to provide the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits more than 42 million Americans rely on to put food on the table.
Jennifer Ludden of NPR notes that about one of every eight Americans gets an average of $187 a month in food assistance. Most of those who use SNAP are children, older Americans, veterans, people with disabilities, and working people, chief executive officer Joel Berg of Hunger Free America told Ludden. “If the SNAP program shuts down, we will have the most mass hunger suffering we’ve had in America since the Great Depression.”
Republicans are trying to convince Americans that the Democrats are responsible for the pain of the shutdown. At the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service website, a banner reads: “Due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown, this government website will not be updated during the funding lapse. President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people.”
In addition to being an open violation of the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits the use of government resources for partisan purposes, this statement badly misrepresents what’s going on in Washington, D.C. President Donald J. Trump is refusing even to talk with Democrats, let alone negotiate to reopen the government, and Republican lawmakers are following his lead. He and MAGA Republicans are trying to muscle Senate Democrats into passing the continuing resolution the House passed on September 19 before they left town.
For their part, the Democrats are refusing to agree to fund the government until the Republicans work with them to extend the premium tax credits that support access to the Affordable Care Act marketplace for healthcare insurance. In their “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” of July, Republicans extended tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations but permitted the premium tax credits to expire. Democrats have also asked for Congress to put back into Medicaid the $1 trillion the Republicans took out of it in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
According to the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit healthcare research foundation, the loss of the premium tax credits will cause nearly 5 million people to lose their health insurance in 2026. The cost of premiums will force healthy Americans out of the pool as they decide to drop their coverage, sending premium prices skyrocketing for millions more. The Commonwealth Fund also projects that the loss of the premium tax credits will cost almost 340,000 jobs, including about 154,000 in healthcare-related industries and 185,000 in other sectors. Those losses will cause a $2.5 billion decline in local and state tax revenues.
Trump is trying to make the impasse between the parties about the shutdown, but that obscures the actual fight at hand. What is at stake is the theory behind the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act: the destruction of the modern American government that was put in place in the 1930s by Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and expanded from then until 1981 under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Today’s fight is about the cuts made by billionaire Elon Musk as head of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” and cuts made after Musk left the administration by Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought.
Republicans have embraced the destruction of the modern government, slashing SNAP benefits, Medicaid, cancer research, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), and so on. The Democrats are defending the government that has been in place since the 1930s, focused on leveling the playing field between the very wealthy and ordinary Americans.
Trump is determined to resurrect the pre–New Deal system in the United States and refuses to entertain any notion that his vision will not work. That refusal to be crossed showed over the past twenty-four hours when he exploded over a Canadian advertisement aired last night that quoted an April 25, 1987, speech in which Republican president Ronald Reagan criticized tariffs as “trade barriers” that “hurt every American worker and consumer.”
“High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars,’’ Reagan said in both the speech and the advertisement. “The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers, and less and less competition. So, soon, because of the prices made artificially high by tariffs that subsidize inefficiency and poor management, people stop buying. Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs.”
During the 2024 campaign, Trump insisted that tariffs like those imposed in the late nineteenth century would nurture the economy and fund the government alone, permitting tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. He rejected economists’ assessment that tariffs are paid by consumers and that they would slow economic growth.
Last night, apparently furious at the implied criticism of his tariffs with the words of a Republican icon, as well as the fact that Canadians bypassed him by appealing directly to the American people, Trump announced on social media that “TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A.” He continued: “ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED.” Today he continued to post pro-tariff messages, saying, for example: “THE UNITED STATES IS WEALTHY, POWERFUL, AND NATIONALLY SECURE AGAIN, ALL BECAUSE OF TARIFFS!” and “THE STOCK MARKET IS STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE BECAUSE OF TARIFFS!”
In fact, the government’s inflation report, released today, shows that inflation has climbed to 3%, and the White House says it will likely not release October inflation report because of the government shutdown. At the same time, the administration’s cuts to the government have not created the savings promised: yesterday the U.S. debt passed $38 trillion. This was the fastest accumulation of a trillion dollars of debt outside of the Covid-19 pandemic, with the U.S. hitting $37 trillion in August and $38 trillion just two months later.
Distrust of Trump’s economic vision is showing in polls. As G. Elliot Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers, an Economist/YouGov poll shows that 53% of Americans think the economy is getting worse. The latest Gallup poll shows that Americans now think Democrats, rather than Republicans, are the better party to keep the country prosperous, by a margin of 47% to 43%. This is a shift of 18 points in just over two years.
Trump appears to want the world to conform to his ideology in foreign affairs as well as in the domestic sphere, claiming the ultimate power over life and death without regard to the rule of law. When a reporter asked him yesterday why he didn’t ask Congress for a declaration of war against those South American drug cartels he claims are at war with the United States, Trump answered: “Well, I don’t think we’re gonna necessarily ask for a declaration of war, I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK? We’re going to kill them. You know? They’re going to be, like dead. OK?”
Today Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the military has struck yet another boat in the Caribbean, for a total of ten so far. Six people on the boat died in the strike.
Trump talks about the administration’s strikes on boats in the region as an attempt to stop the importation of drugs into the U.S., but observers suggest the administration is really attempting to encourage Venezuelans to rise up against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Hegseth announced today he was sending the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford and its strike group of five destroyers to the waters off South America. The group will join the growing military buildup in the region. Alayna Treene, Kylie Atwood, and Katie Bo Lillis of CNN reported today that the Trump administration is considering targeting drug routes and cocaine facilities in Venezuela itself.
Today the administration also imposed sanctions on leftist President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, as well as his family and a member of his government, claiming they are participants in the global drug trade.
And yet, for all the administration’s insistence that it can shape the world as it wants, it seems worried about the American people. Yesterday Trump dismissed the No Kings protests of last Saturday, saying the “crowds were not big at all” and claiming the signs were “all made professionally in a printing shop. Looks like on Madison Avenue someplace.” He said: “Some guy is paying for all that stuff…. These people are going crazy, they’re going crazy ‘cause they’re getting paid. ‘Cause there’s no reason for them to be going crazy, but you watch some of them, and they’re professional agitators, and we are finding out who’s paying them. Yeah. We have a lot of information about who they are. You’re gonna be very surprised when you find out.”
And, today the Department of Justice announced it will monitor polling sites in six jurisdictions in the upcoming November 4 elections. The observers will go to California and New Jersey, two Democratic-dominated states that will be holding elections with national consequences.
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Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/23/states-snap-food-aid-benefits-government-shutdown-00619117
https://www.fns.usda.gov/
https://apnews.com/article/trump-treasury-debt-ceiling-bessent-09575f13ca95c2f1beb38234b2cbe85b
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/schumer-says-democrats-seeking-meeting-with-trump-2025-10-21/
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/10/23/trump-maduro-boat-strikes-interview-00618927
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gp2lxz75eo
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/us-strike-drug-boat-rcna239564
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/24/g-s1-94970/us-sanctions-colombia-president-petro-drug-allegations
https://apnews.com/live/donald-trump-news-updates-10-24-2025
https://www.cfr.org/article/much-ado-about-maduro
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/24/politics/venezuela-cocaine-trafficking-routes-trump
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/24/nx-s1-5581354/federal-shutdown-snap-wic-food-aid-ebt-hunger
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-monitor-polling-sites-california-new-jersey
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