Trump’s Budget Kicked One Woman Off SNAP Over a Birthday Gift

Residents in Arizona are struggling to receive SNAP benefits as the state rushes to install new eligibility requirements set by Donald Trump’s “one, big, beautiful bill,” NBC News reported Monday.

Since Trump’s behemoth budget bill passed last July, setting in motion nearly $187 million in cuts from SNAP over the next 10 years, 3.5 million people have fallen off SNAP rolls nationwide. The law requires able-bodied adults between ages 18 and 64 without dependents to work 80 hours a month, or 20 hours a week, to qualify for SNAP benefits.

Arizona has moved rapidly to comply with Trump’s new requirements, increasing the amount of documentation individuals must produce and bolstering the review process. The result: As of March, there had been a 50 percent decrease in the state’s SNAP enrollees compared to just a year earlier—the largest drop-off in the country—including 200,000 children.

In the rush to enforce these new requirements, it seems many eligible Americans have also been pushed off the program.

Following a months-long paperwork back-and-forth with state employees, Tiffany Hudson, a single mother of two young children, decided to show up in person to the state Department of Economic Security office. Despite being exempt from the new work requirements, Hudson said she’d stopped receiving her $600 in SNAP benefits three months ago.

“It’s been really hard. We’ve been going to food banks every week,” Hudson told NBC News. “We’re eating less, we’re eating more frozen stuff.”

After waiting for hours to speak with an employee, she was told she needed to provide more documentation, as well as a written statement from her father clarifying that a birthday gift she’d received over Zelle was not a recurring payment.

Inside the Arizona Department of Economic Security, increased requirements have placed a strain on the employees charged with processing SNAP applications after 400 people were laid off in July. Part of Trump’s “beautiful bill” required states to keep their payment error rate below 6.6 percent or be forced to pay for a portion of SNAP benefits themselves. Arizona’s error rate was 8.8 percent in fiscal year 2024, and projected to be around 10 percent in fiscal year 2025. The state could face up to $208 million in costs if it doesn’t lower that rate this year.

Meanwhile, the Arizonans who are getting kicked off their benefits are turning to donations to survive. St. Mary’s Food Bank, the largest in the state, reported a 12 percent increase in demand across Arizona. Milton Liu, head of St. Mary’s, told NBC News that demand has already increased as much as 25 percent over the past year in some rural counties. He expected that number will only continue to grow.

House Republicans are trying to completely expunge any record of President Trump’s two impeachments.

This latest show of fealty, led by California Representative Darrell Issa, would have Trump’s 2019 and 2021 impeachments “expunged as if such Articles had never passed the full House of Representatives.”

“An impeachment is basically an indictment and it’s an indictment that you can’t really be acquitted from. If you are impeached by the House, famously, ‘Where do you go to get your reputation back?’ is the question,” Issa said to Fox News Digital. “And that’s sort of a problem that we’re dealing with, which is that the president was wrongfully accused, the evidence is now out that there was withheld information and false information, but where do we go to unring this bell? And the answer is we go back to Congress and we go to the House floor and we have a vote.”

The president was not wrongfully accused on either count. There is a wealth of evidence to confirm the first article of Trump’s 2019 impeachment, which came after he tried to convince the Ukrainian government to give him some damning dirt on Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election. There is a transcript of Trump personally requesting it. As for his second impeachment, the president most certainly incited an insurrection on January 6, 2021. Yet GOP House members are acting as if they have some moral obligation to strike the impeachments from the record.

Even more confusing—both of these impeachment attempts failed spectacularly, and Trump came out of them stronger, winning reelection in 2024. Isn’t that a more compelling story to Republicans than trying to rewrite history with a symbolic expungement for someone who never faced consequences?

President Trump wants to suspend the federal gas tax, telling CBS News Monday that he thinks “it’s a great idea.”

“We’re going to take off the gas tax for a period of time, and when gas goes down, we’ll let it phase back in,” Trump said in a phone interview. It’s a tacit admission that the effects of the Iran war aren’t going away anytime soon.

Gas prices have gone up 50 percent since the war started February 28, and cost an average of $4.52 per gallon in the U.S. as of this writing. As long as Iran (and the United States) block transit to and from the Strait of Hormuz, those prices will stay high. Pausing the federal taxes on fuel would amount to 18.4 cents less per gallon of gas and 24.4 cents less per gallon of diesel, but doing so requires an act of Congress.

Republicans in Congress are already working to carry out the president’s wish. Senator Josh Hawley and Representative Anna Paulina Luna said Monday that they plan to introduce bills in the Senate and House, respectively. If they’re successful, pausing the gas tax would cost the federal government half a billion dollars per week, money that pays for highway maintenance and other transportation projects.

Meanwhile, a peace deal with Iran is far away. Trump said Monday that the current ceasefire was on “massive life support” after he rejected Iran’s latest proposal as “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE” the day before. If the ceasefire ends and the U.S. resumes strikes against Iran, that would only send oil prices even higher, wiping out whatever temporary relief Americans get from the tax pause.

Trump’s poll numbers are already historically low. Does he think he can fool the American people with a temporary measure?

President Trump just got sued for painting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool blue as part of an increasingly expensive renovation project.

The Cultural Landscape Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on increasing “support and understanding for cultural landscapes,” filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., Monday against the Department of the Interior and the National Parks Service, alleging the Trump administration broke federal law with the new paint job.

The lawsuit states that since the pool is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the paint job was subject to a review under law. The organization is seeking either a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order to prevent more blue paint from being added.

The group’s president and CEO, Charles Birnbaum, said in a statement that the blue paint “is more appropriate to a resort or theme park,” adding that the bottom of the pool has been grey since its construction in 1924.

The lawsuit comes on the same day as a New York Times report that found Trump’s renovation of the pool will cost more than seven times the $1.8 million he originally estimated. The Interior Department said Friday that it now plans to pay $13.1 million to a Virginia firm, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which Trump chose because it worked on his Sterling, Virginia, golf club’s swimming pools.

Last month, the company was awarded a no-bid contract by the Trump administration, which claimed that renovating the pool was so urgent that delaying it would cause “serious injury” to the government, but wouldn’t say why. The government has also said that Trump wants to get the project done before America’s 250th birthday celebrations on July Fourth. The contract gives Atlantic Industrial Coatings a 20 percent profit margin.

This is just another example of Trump attempting to remake Washington, D.C., in the aesthetic of his real estate properties. He is also getting sued over his proposed golden arch and White House ballroom. With a compliant Congress and Supreme Court, it seems Trump will end up leaving his permanent stamp on the nation’s capital.

The architect of Donald Trump’s second-term immigration agenda is losing his influence.

White House deputy chief of staff and Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller has aimed to rewrite U.S. immigration policy since his early days in Washington as a Senate aide. But even atop his perch within the Trump administration, Miller’s schemes have experienced myriad setbacks.

Thus far, the president has dismantled the Border Patrol strike forces that Miller had campaigned for, turned on former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for effectively following Miller’s orders, and handed the reins of America’s deportation program back to law enforcement officials, reported The Atlantic Monday.

The White House insists that Miller’s place within Trump’s entourage has not changed, and that he remains a steadfast and widely respected adviser to the president.

“The President loves Stephen,” White House communications director Steven Cheung told The Atlantic in a statement. “And the White House staff respects him tremendously.”

But behind the scenes, Trump’s language about the immigration aide is changing. The president has privately joked that Miller’s “truest feelings” are too extreme for the public, and reportedly thinks that sometimes Miller takes things too far, according to presidential advisers that spoke with the magazine.

Trump reportedly disagreed with Miller’s description of Alex Pretti—one of two U.S. citizens shot and killed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis this winter—as a “domestic terrorist,” and acknowledged afterward that U.S. policy needed to shift as a result.

Miller has framed immigration as an “invasion.” He has advocated to end habeas corpus for immigrants; promoted large-scale raids at workplaces, churches, and neighborhoods; threatened the futures of immigrants who do not “self-deport”; and encouraged the White House to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. He has leveraged his position within the administration to advance American warmongering abroad, pushing the White House to bomb boats in the Caribbean when a plan to invade Mexico fell through.

What is not clear is how long Trump will keep Miller, and his violent ideologies, around. Miller’s influence on his pet project, immigration, is already waning.

“I think the president knows very, very well what he can go to Stephen for, and what he probably shouldn’t tell him if he doesn’t want to get an earful,” one former administration official told The Atlantic. Another adviser was more blunt: “The president knows who he is, period.”

Since Noem was ousted, the power structure has shifted, with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and border czar Tom Homan taking the lead on U.S. immigration policy in Miller’s place.

“The new secretary is listening to Tom Homan and [Border Protection Commissioner] Rodney Scott before he is ever listening to Stephen Miller,” a senior administration official told The Atlantic. “We just have law enforcement in charge.”

Without Noem to muck up the agenda, Miller’s direct involvement with the agency no longer seems necessary.

“The entire White House has to worry less about cleaning up after DHS with new leadership in there,” one White House official said.