The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 5 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
On Tuesday, President Trump angrily threatened to stop doling out food stamp payments until Democrats capitulate in the government shutdown fight. Coming after a judge ordered the administration to continue payments, Trump’s threat unleashed widespread fears that he is now directly defying the courts. Then we saw something unusual. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt quickly clarified that no, Trump is going to obey the law after all. She offered a tortured explanation as to what Trump initially meant that wasn’t persuasive at all. We think this shows that Trump’s team knows they’re in a weak position in the shutdown, legally and politically. They did not want to be perceived as breaking the law to deny food to the hungry. David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, has a good piece arguing that Trump knows he’s lost the politics of this standoff. So we’re talking to him about all this should shape our understanding of what’s coming next. Dave, thanks for coming on.
David Dayen: Thanks for having me on.
Sargent: So let’s start with this threat. Trump raged on Truth Social that, “SNAP benefits will be given only when the radical left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do and not before.” Trump also ranted a bit about “crooked Joe Biden” and made up some bullshit about how there was widespread fraud in the program under him and so forth. Dave, that sure sounded like a direct threat from Trump but that would defy the courts. Can you bring us up to date on all that?
Dayen: Yeah, I mean, what Trump is saying there is going back to what the administration’s position was initially—that they weren’t going to tap a contingency fund that was set up by Congress in the event of a lapse in appropriations or some emergency need. That was supposed to go directly to SNAP, and there’s about four and a half billion dollars in there.
The administration last week said, We’re not allowed to tap that; that’s for other contingencies, not for a loss of appropriations, and we’re not going to do it. So on November 1, nobody gets their SNAP benefits.
SNAP benefits are administered monthly, so people who are on that program—and it’s 42 million Americans, one in eight Americans—they last got benefits on October 1. So they’ve drained most of those, and they’re now waiting on November 1 for a replenishment. And the administration was saying they can’t do that.
And so several states sued, but this was also, in the court of public opinion, becoming a real lead weight for Trump and the administration. It was pretty obvious that they were obligated to use the contingency. That’s why Congress put it there. And indeed, two judges said, No, you have to do this. You have to use this contingency fund.
And on Monday, they came out and said, OK, we’ll use it—but we’ll only pay half the benefits. And that’s because it costs about $8 billion a month for SNAP to be administered. And there are other ways, other funds that they could shuffle around money legally that would get it to that $8 billion number.
But they decided, No, we’re just going to follow the bare-minimum law, and we’re going to pay out half the benefits. And then Trump comes, after they’ve agreed to that—Trump comes out and says, No, I’m not going to even do that.
Sargent: Right. And that’s exactly what he said and exactly what he meant. But White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was asked by a reporter directly whether Trump will defy the courts on the snap funding. Here’s her answer.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): No. The administration is fully complying with the court order. I just spoke to the president about it. The recipients of these SNAP benefits need to understand it’s going to take some time to receive this money because the Democrats have forced the administration into a very untenable position. We are digging into a contingency fund that is supposed to be for emergencies, catastrophes, for war. And the president does not want to have to tap into this fund in the future. And that’s what he was referring to.
Sargent: So, Dave, there, Leavitt is referring to that judge’s previous order that the administration must pay out the food stamps from that emergency fund. And as you said, the administration seemed to be at least partially doing that. What she’s trying to say there is all Trump meant is he doesn’t want to use the contingency fund anymore in the future. You know, of course he’s going to follow the law. But I think Trump clearly was threatening to defy the courts and cut this off. How did you read it?
Dayen: Yeah, I think there’s no question. I don’t think you can read it any other way. And so Leavitt cleaning that up is an indicator that they don’t want to get out in front of the courts and be in this situation over SNAP benefits.
They’ve been happy to defy the courts over other, lower-profile issues, but it’s literally about taking food out of the hands of poor people. And when you add the additional context that the Trump administration has, of dubious legality, moved around money to pay troops—so they obviously have the ability to think creatively about this stuff—and also the fact that the day before these SNAP benefits got cut off, the president was down at Mar-a-Lago doing a Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party, which is literally like a literal embodiment of let them eat cake, the sort of Marie Antoinette view of the world.
So the optics are terrible here for the president and the administration. And when he decided, in whatever—you know, whatever synapse fired in his brain—when he decided to try to re-litigate the fight, that was even worse and necessitated this cleanup.
Sargent: Yeah. And I think it gets at something interesting as well about Trump’s kind of weak position here, right? Trump clearly did intend this threat as kind of a way to say, Hey, Democrats, I’m powerful, and I’m going to use leverage and power against Democrats to extract pain and retribution from your helpless voters. I’m totally in charge. You’re weak and you’re—you know—you’re submissive.
He meant that as a show of strength. Now, it’s absurd on its face because a lot of Trump voters are on food stamps as well, so he’d be hurting a lot of his own people. But the thing is, he thinks that this is a show of him owning the Dems and owning the libs, right?
Yet clearly it’s seen by at least some people in the White House as politically untenable, even if the whole surface story is that we’re just going after Democrats. You can’t punish Dem voters—at least the poor and hungry ones. That’s untenable for them. That’s what they’ve decided. I find that a revealing show of weakness. What do you think?
Dayen: Yeah, I mean, this is how the entire shutdown has gone, really—at least politically. First, Trump said, I’m going to cut off spending in blue areas, infrastructure spending, things like that. Then he said, I’m going to fire federal workers, with the implication that they’re all Democrats or something. He decided he’s going to fire all of them.
And every time he has escalated, his position has gotten worse and worse in the court of public opinion. Republicans are blamed at higher numbers for the shutdown than Democrats. That’s been consistent since day one, and nothing he’s done—none of these power moves to punish Democrats for the shutdown—none of that has changed that reality one iota.
In fact, they have either backed off doing more of these layoffs, which were really kind of minor, and spending cuts, or they’ve had them reversed in the courts, like with the SNAP—and also with the layoffs, those have been reversed in the courts as well. So they’ve gotten essentially nowhere, and it’s bled over into other areas.
The way that Democrats have put the shutdown together, they have raised the salience of health care and the Affordable Care Act subsidies in particular. On November 1, open enrollment began for those subsidies on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Everyone can see these prices skyrocketing—what their costs would be skyrocketing. It plays into the biggest issue that we’re seeing play out in these elections, as well as just sort of as a top topic more generally, which is affordability.
And Democrats are now trusted more on the economy than Trump—for one of the first times ever, in any time that Trump has been president. Something like two-thirds of voters think that Trump has neglected the cost-of-living issue. And so the ham-fisted efforts on the shutdown—the negative feedback that he’s gotten on that—has bled over into other topics. It’s bled over into his handling of the economy. And so that’s where he’s become more vulnerable. And I think that’s a factor in the way the administration’s thinking about it.
Sargent: Yeah, and your piece—which was really good and got at Trump’s kind of fundamental weakness in this battle—you drew this link, as you just did in what you just said, between his stance in the shutdown fight—his kind of weak stance, his weak position in the shutdown fight—on the one hand, and his weakness on the economy on the other.
And that seems to me to be critical in understanding this SNAP showdown as well. Trump is in a weak position in the shutdown in large part because he’s in such a terrible position on the economy. There have even been some polls that say that if there is economic pain from the shutdown, it will be the fault of Trump or the Republicans to a much greater degree than the Democrats.
So clearly his disapproval on the economy—which is really, really high, and people don’t really realize how bad it is for him, but it is—is bleeding into his weak stance, or at least is weakening him, in the shutdown. And that’s why I think the SNAP benefits in particular are a place where they can’t be perceived to be breaking the law.
Can you talk more about that connection?
Dayen: Yeah, I think—and at this point, we have to give Democrats credit for, you know, pulling the political issue to the top of mind of the public. We could talk about the policy stakes later, but from a political standpoint, they said, We are focused on these Affordable Care Act subsidies; we’re focused on health care affordability.
And suddenly, where that was kind of off the radar, that became a very salient issue. Now, it probably was going to anyway, because open enrollment was set for November 1 anyway, and that sticker shock was already kind of baked in and was going to happen. But it definitely raised the salience of it to a certain degree.
And it put Trump on the wrong side of the number-one issue that is facing Americans, which is the cost of living. So that was a clever technique. And that’s why Trump is in this box.
Sargent: Yeah. And I think you can actually look at Karoline Leavitt there as undercutting Trump in a way. Maybe she really had no choice because, again, Trump goes out there and does that tweet thinking he’s doing a show of strength. He thinks he’s putting Democrats on the defensive.
But Karoline Leavitt and whoever’s making the decisions in there, it’s a little tough to track. You know, she pretended that it was Trump decisively reversing himself. I don’t know if you noticed that, but she said, you know, I talked to the president and of course he’s going to follow the law.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s the way it went down. I think someone went and said, Mr. President, you know, you’re going to have to follow the law because you don’t want to be perceived to be breaking the law to take out food from hungry people, do you? No, of course not. And so she was really kind of undercut cutting what he thought was a show of strength on his part.
Dayen: Yeah. Someone said to him, you know, bad tweet. You got to fix that one. And I think the politics of food stamps are interesting. You alluded to it before, but the fact is that large numbers of poor rural Americans are benefiting from this program. It’s not as cut and dried as the way that we think about this, where the farm bill has food stamp policy and agriculture policy, and it’s supposed to be the agriculture benefits are for the Republicans and those food stamps are for the Democrats. And that’s not really the way it is anymore. And I think he’s gotten caught up in a politics that he doesn’t quite understand.
Sargent: Yes, absolutely. I think that’s really interesting. And I think it would behoove us all to try to understand that Trump isn’t always all powerful. I think a lot of people have kind of internalized this view of Trump as strong and threatening.
So when he threatens to defy the courts, people instinctively default to, oh no, he’s doing something terrifying, he’s in total control. But the politics of law breaking are bad for them a lot of the time. I think you said this earlier, Trump is breaking the law on a bunch of fronts, but it’s not really always that clear cut. They seem to be in some tension internally.
You’ve observed a lot of administrations, do you see that too? I see them as kind of not exactly sure of how far they want to go with the law breaking. It’s not clear cut, he’s not totally in control is what I mean.
Dayen: What I would say is that I think what this administration has done, almost from the beginning, is kind of push on the door and see if it will open. You know, they’re looking for the weak spots in the democracy. They’re looking for ways to aggrandize power more and more. And if they’re not resisted against, then they’ll push through that door—whether it’s resisted in the courts, or resisted by Democrats, or resisted by elites, universities and law firms and so forth, businesses.
So, you know, I think what that means is, if you’re someone who opposes the president and his policies, you have to get out there and be in the fight. And that’s the way that they back off. And I think we see that at work here in the food stamp case, but I think we see it also in other cases.
I mean, just on Wednesday, there’s going to be a Supreme Court hearing over the tariffs that Trump put in place. And the Supreme Court, in my view, is probably going to be more inclined to say, No, you don’t have the ability to unilaterally impose these tariffs on whatever whim you want. And that’s interesting. In fact, a lot of the amicus briefs in that case are from traditional conservatives who are saying, We don’t want this imbalance of power and this ability for a king-like figure to impose tariffs whenever and wherever he wants. It’s literally a core constitutional issue.
I think they’re trying to find the weak spots, but what that means is that the proper pushback is to, you know, get in front of those weak spots and reinforce them.
Sargent: I think you get at a critical point, which is that Trump is consolidating authoritarian power primarily in areas where it’s a little easier for him to do so, where he faces less resistance. When he does face resistance, it doesn’t always happen; he actually loses. And by the way, I think we should talk about this aspect of it too. By the time people listen to this, the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections and some other ones in California and so forth will have been decided since you’ll be listening to this on Wednesday, folks.
But today’s Tuesday as we record and Donald Trump and his team decided it wasn’t a good idea to be seen to be breaking the law to deny food to the hungry while people are voting in these elections, particularly like in the one in Virginia where the layoffs of federal workers is an enormous issue. So, I’m going to sort of put this out there and see what you think, Dave. Presuming that those elections go decently, that could actually make them more reluctant going forward to break the law in certain situations. Don’t you think? Is that too optimistic or could it look like that?
Dayen: I would argue that, you know, elections are certainly a snapshots, and in our nationalized political environment, elections are referendums—usually on the party in power. And if Donald Trump was really confident that his agenda was super popular, he would have been in New Jersey and Virginia this week on the stump.
And he wasn’t. And it’s not like he has nowhere to stay in New Jersey—literally, his golf club in Bedminster is right there. And the White House isn’t too far from Virginia, for that matter. But he bailed. He went down to Florida to party.
I think that tells you something. It tells you that he doesn’t want to; he wants to distance himself from what are going to be some losses. But the truth is that he’s unable to distance himself because these races have been nationalized. These races are going to be a commentary on his leadership. And that leadership is broadly unpopular.
So will this lead to him pulling back on authoritarian impulses? I’m not certain of that.
It probably depends on a case-by-case basis, but I do think it gives a lesson to Democrats to get in the fight, and that these are fights that can be won. I think nowhere is that more clear than in California, where there was this belief that, Oh, Trump is going to gerrymander and rig these elections—and what are we going to do about it?
And to his credit, Gavin Newsom stepped up and said, Actually, we can do something about it. And we—you know, it’s a complicated maneuver—but we can get this new map in front of voters. And, you know, I live here in California, and the opposition stopped campaigning about a month ago. They knew it was over. They didn’t want to throw bad money after good, or good money after bad.
And this is going to win by large, large margins. It’s not going to be a Dewey Defeats Truman situation. It’s really going to win. And that offsets a large part of the damage from the Texas gerrymander and some of the other ones around the country.
So the lesson, I think, for Democrats is that you can’t rest on complaints and talk of decorum or norms or the damage to democracy—you have to get in the fight. And it’s not a when they go low, we go high kind of moment. You have to get in the gutter and play politics.
Sargent: I think what we need here is kind of a virtuous cycle where more engagement leads to more wins, which leads to more engagement, which leads to more wins. Dave Dayen, so good to talk to you, man. That was all so beautifully said. Thanks so much for coming on.
Dayen: All right. Thanks a lot.