Trump and JD Vance Whine They’ve Been Ordered to Fund Food Stamps

If President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance really want to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, why are they both kicking and screaming at a federal judge’s latest order to do just that?

The Department of Justice rushed Thursday evening to appeal a ruling that would require the Trump administration to fully fund SNAP benefits for November amid the government shutdown. Meanwhile, Trump and Vance complained about the order to reporters in the East Room at the White House.

The vice president seemed particularly disturbed by the notion that a federal judge could force the Trump administration’s hand.

“It’s an absurd ruling because you have a federal judge effectively telling us what we have to do in the midst of a Democrat government shutdown,” Vance said. “Which, what we’d like to do is for the Democrats to open up the government, and, of course, then we can fund SNAP and we could also do a lot of other good things for the American people. But in the midst of a shutdown, we can’t have the federal court telling the president how he has to triage the situation.

“We’re trying to keep as much turned on, we’re trying to keep as much going as possible,” Vance said. “The president and the entire administration are working on that, but we’re not going to do it under the orders of a federal judge.”

Trump also weighed in with a confusing answer about the country needing to remain “very liquid.”

“We can’t give everything away based on a number,” Trump said, ostensibly talking about the number of SNAP recipients (42 million), though what number he was referring to was unclear.

“Biden went totally crazy, gave it to anybody that would ask. Gave it to people that were able-bodied, had no problem. Anybody who would ask would get the number,” Trump said.

It sounds like Trump no longer thinks it would be an “honor” to fund SNAP should a court order him to do so, as he claimed on Truth Social less than a week ago.

It was Trump’s own blatant unwillingness to fund SNAP that got him into this situation in the first place. In issuing his new, stricter ruling Thursday evening, U.S. District Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. cited Trump’s rageful Truth Social Post claiming that benefits “will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government” as evidence of the president’s “intent to defy” a previous order that required him to pay for only some benefits.

Donald Trump bizarrely claimed that the United States has to remain “very liquid” because the country could be hit by unforeseen problems at any time. 

Speaking from the White House’s East Room Thursday night, Trump told reporters that “our country has to remain very liquid because problems, catastrophes, wars—could be anything. We have to remain liquid. We can’t give everything away,” claiming that President Biden gave money away to “anybody who would ask,” including the “able-bodied.” 

Trump gave the answer after being asked about a court ruling requiring his administration to fully fund the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program, which 42 million low-income Americans depend on.

Trump seems to have no idea how the U.S. economy works, given that the country could just print more money if being “liquid” is really the main concern (it shouldn’t be). His jab at Biden seems to be based on right-wing complaints about “tax and spend” Democrats, and an attempt to evade criticism over his administration defying court rulings on SNAP.  

Under the current administration, the national debt is experiencing its highest rate of growth since the Covid-19 pandemic. This has only been compounded by the government shutdown, which is costing the country billions of dollars each week. Trump has no room to criticize his predecessor about spending, as his presidency is costing the country dearly. 

As inflation rises, layoffs surge, and SNAP benefits stop, President Trump told Americans point-blank that he does not want to hear about their affordability issues. 

“Talk about the cost of Thanksgiving, and the cost of living through Thanksgiving.… Our energy costs are way down, our groceries are way down, everything is way down. And the press doesn’t report it,” the president said last evening while taking questions from reporters. “You know, I call the Democrats conmen and women, they make up numbers. But when you look at the 25 percent reduction in costs for Thanksgiving between Biden and me … it’s the biggest reduction in cost in the history of that chart or whatever it is they do.”

The Thanksgiving cost numbers Trump is touting come directly from Walmart, which is selling a $40 Thanksgiving basket compared to a $55 one last year. But this year’s meal has less food in it too.  

“So I don’t wanna hear about the affordability,” Trump continued. “We’re getting close to $2 a gallon gasoline. With Biden it was $4.50, $5. Another thing, inflation. We had the worst inflation in the history of our country. Now we have virtually no inflation at all … so the affordability is much better with the Republicans.”

This short rant was ridden with lies. Everything is not “way down.” 

Inflation is still going up. This summer, Americans saw the biggest grocery price jump in over three years. Average grocery prices in September were around 2.7 percent higher than they were the year before and around 1.4 percent higher than they were when Trump got back into office in January. 

It’s truly a travesty that this man who campaigned on affordability, and on remembering the forgotten working class, is now telling those very same people to shut up and be happy while outright lying about the state of affordability in this country. It was already bad, and Trump has unquestionably made it worse. But he’d rather lie and finger-point than admit that and work to fix it.   

It appears that President Donald Trump’s angry social media posts have once again landed him in hot water in the courts: A judge ordered him Thursday to pay for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in full.

U.S. District Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island delivered a scathing rebuke of Trump’s Truth Social post from Tuesday, when the president claimed that money for SNAP benefits “will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government.” The White House later clarified that the administration still intended to pay half of the benefits for November.

McConnell said that the president’s post was essentially an admission of his “intent to defy” his prior court order, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney on X. The judge’s order last week had required officials to obey the law and use the USDA’s contingency funds to pay for at least some SNAP benefits.

The judge said that Trump and his allies had openly admitted they were withholding funding for SNAP benefits for “political reasons.” Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson admitted that feeding the hungry would mess up his political game because it would “deviate from the goal of reopening the entire government.”

McConnell ordered the Department of Agriculture to pay for November’s SNAP benefits in full by Friday, warning that if the government wavered, “people will go hungry, food pantries will be burdened and … suffering will occur.” He added: “It’s likely that SNAP recipients are hungry as we sit here.”

At a White House press conference Thursday announcing lower costs for weight-loss drugs, Donald Trump decided to ask for part of a company. 

Trump was sitting at his desk in the Oval Office surrounded by health officials from his administration, as well as executives from pharmaceutical companies Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. When a reporter asked the president about Novo Nordisk’s acquisition of an obesity biotech company, Trump quipped to CEO Maziar Mike Doustdar, “Maybe you should give us a piece of the company like I’ve been asking for, give the United States a nice big chunk of the company.”  

Doustdar chuckled but ignored the president’s suggestion and went on to explain the acquisition. It’s unclear how serious Trump is about asking for a piece of the pharmaceutical giant, but his government has already taken stakes in several American companies, including U.S. Steel, Intel, Trilogy Metals, Lithium Americas, and MP Materials. 

If not for a patient on Eli Lilly’s GLP-1 medication physically collapsing during the press conference, Trump’s open desire for a piece of Novo Nordisk might have been the headline from the meeting, and not the supposed goal of lowering drug prices. The president has repeatedly claimed that he would lower drug prices (often by mathematically impossible amounts) and announced that the government would launch a website to sell prescription drugs directly to the American people.

If Trump decides to go ahead and pursue a piece of Novo Nordisk, he would be under more public pressure to successfully lower the cost of prescriptions. However, his ill-advised tariff policies feeding into his poor handling of the economy might undermine that goal.