Shutdown Politics

Susan Estrich on Nov 8, 2025

It has been a terrifying week for the one in eight Americans who depend on food stamps -- the SNAP program -- to feed their families. Would they be eating this month?

With two federal lawsuits and two federal judges breathing down the administration's neck, President Donald Trump took to social media this week to threaten to withhold SNAP payments until the shutdown ended. The Agriculture Department, meanwhile, was coming up with such complicated rules for the partial payments it claimed it was only able to make that it appeared that some recipients would get nothing at all.

To paraphrase Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, what do you do? Tell your children they only get half a hamburger? Or maybe two-thirds, which was the percentage the Agriculture Department was offering after admitting that calculation errors had led it to forecast a lower percentage payment.

And that, of course, led the plaintiffs in the two pending lawsuits running back to court, where on Thursday they secured a court order that the government pay the SNAP benefits in full. We'll see. It is no time to be a government lawyer, forced to defend the indefensible, and with a principal who expresses open disdain for court orders. At least this time, the judge singled out that open disdain and held it against the administration, pointing to Trump's social media post as proof that the government was not following the court's orders. On Friday, the government appealed to try to stop the payments.

It was a shell game, all along. The Agriculture Department had the funds in reserve to fully fund SNAP. It was choosing not to use them, to let people suffer, to let families go hungry, so long as they blamed the Democrats for doing it. But that strategy is not working so well, not this time. When you control the White House, the Senate, the House and the Court, it's pretty much impossible to say you're not to blame when the government shuts down.

This is Trump's shutdown. And it isn't just poor families, whom Trump has shown himself willing to sacrifice, who will pay the price.

Who do you blame when your flight gets cancelled?

The news of slowdowns at all the major airports in America is not going to be welcomed by travelers. Exit polls from key states on Tuesday showed Trump losing voters on the economy and immigration, the two key issues that propelled his victory. It's his economy now, and everything is too expensive; his immigration policies have gone too far.

Prosecuting a protester for throwing a sandwich is not the answer. The administration made its lawyers look like fools in yet another courtroom this week, where they unsuccessfully sought to prosecute a former Justice Department paralegal for throwing a subway sandwich at an immigration officer. There's an old joke that a good prosecutor could convince a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, but that didn't work for the once prestigious U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, which couldn't convince a grand jury to return a felony indictment for tossing the sandwich. So they didn't stop, which is their pattern: they decided to try him for a misdemeanor. And failed. The jury returned a not guilty verdict. The Office looked like fools.

The U.S. Attorney's office in Virginia looked no better as a judge there took the office to task for the way they have handled evidence in the Comey case. The federal magistrate judge took the prosecutors to task for what he called their "indict first, investigate later" approach to the case against the former FBI director. That's how revenge works. In the meantime, Trump plans his ballroom and entertains donors who received some $279 billion in government contracts (compare that to SNAP), according to Pro Publica. Let them eat cake.

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