The Trump administration’s threat to cut off food stamps for tens of millions of people is one of the most brutal assaults on the American working class in history. Beginning Saturday, 42 million people—one in eight Americans—who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will be suddenly confronted with the immediate prospect of hunger.
This massive assault on the working class must be met with a mass movement of workers, uniting the fight against Trump’s developing dictatorship with the struggle against the capitalist oligarchy and the staggering social inequality that underlies his rise to power.
On Friday afternoon, two federal judges issued rulings rejecting Trump’s false claim that the government cannot use the $5.5 billion emergency fund during the shutdown to keep food stamps operating. But even if Trump complies with the order—which is far from certain, given his administration’s routine defiance of the law in its drive to establish a presidential dictatorship—it will not be enough to restore funding in time for tomorrow.
It will take several days to restart payments, as no preparations have been made to disburse the funds. One of the federal judges ordered the government to determine by Monday “whether they will authorize at least reduced SNAP benefits for November” (emphasis added). Once—or if—food stamp funding resumes, half of all recipients will discover that their benefits have been reduced or eliminated entirely under Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill.”
The attack on SNAP benefits is part of a broader social counterrevolution that is rapidly intensifying. Funding is also expiring Saturday for the Women and Infant Children (WIC) food assistance program, which supports 7 million people. Head Start, the early childhood education program, will also run out of funds.
At the same time, the open enrollment period for Obamacare health insurance begins Saturday, and the expiration of federal tax credits will have a devastating impact on millions. Health insurance premiums are set to skyrocket, with costs for many families more than doubling and some households forced to spend up to a quarter of their income just to keep basic coverage.
Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are being forced to go without pay under the shutdown, while the ruling class moves to dismantle what remains of the social safety net. At the top of the target list are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—programs that are viewed by the financial oligarchy as intolerable drains on profit.
In the “private” sector, the corporate elite, flush with record profits and with share values at historic highs, is threatening a new round of mass layoffs. Amazon and UPS are cutting tens of thousands of jobs, with hundreds of thousands more slated to be automated away in the coming years. The auto industry is undergoing massive job cuts, fueled in part by the impact of the trade war. Meanwhile, an AI-driven purge of tech and white-collar workers continues at breakneck speed.
At the start of the shutdown, the Socialist Equality Party wrote: “The working class must intervene in this crisis, mobilizing its immense social power, to force the Trump administration from office and put an end to its criminal conspiracies.”
This is the essential issue. Trump represents an oligarchy that is waging war on society, overseeing the largest transfer of wealth in American history. On Friday afternoon, with millions scrambling to find out how they will eat this weekend, this representative of the criminal underworld spent his time posting dozens of pictures of his refurbished gold and marble bathroom in the White House.
The administration's move to establish a dictatorship expresses the drive of the ruling class to enforce starvation wages, maximize corporate profits, and the domination of a tiny financial elite through military and police repression. It is a government—and a social order—that is completely out of control.
Across the country, the National Guard is being mobilized in preparation for mass opposition. Plans are being finalized to establish “quick reaction” forces of roughly 500 soldiers in each of the 50 states, ready to deploy within 24 hours to suppress “civil unrest” in American cities. The ruling class is preparing to respond to the deepening social crisis, including the possibility of food riots, with state violence to defend the wealth and power of the financial oligarchy.
The Socialist Equality Party calls for the development of mass opposition to the Trump administration’s program of starvation and dictatorship through the independent mobilization of the working class. Rank-and-file committees must be formed in every neighborhood, workplace, and school to organize resistance, unite the struggles of workers and youth across industries and regions, and prepare a coordinated counteroffensive against the capitalist oligarchy.
Democracy and oligarchy are incompatible. In opposition to the program of dictatorship and social regression, a movement must be built, rooted in the working class, for equality and genuine workers’ control. The coterie of billionaires who form Trump’s real social base must be expropriated, the trillion dollar corporations nationalized and placed under workers’ control.
This struggle cannot be defined by or subordinated to the Democratic Party, the other party of Wall Street and US imperialism. The Democrats are motivated solely by the need to keep a lid on the massive social opposition that is bubbling up across the country. They limit themselves to impotent finger-wagging while begging Trump and his right-wing conspirators to come up with a “bipartisan” deal—that is, one which ratifies historic cuts to social spending.
At the “No Kings” demonstrations, the Democrats who bothered to show up urged attendees to do nothing except write their congresspeople and wait for midterm elections that might never take place.
The trade union bureaucracy is increasingly lining up with Trump. On Thursday, the heads of ten major unions, including Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and AFGE President Everett Kelley, met with JD Vance and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, alongside several airline executives. The meeting, officially focused on likely Thanksgiving travel chaos due to the shutdown, was used to denounce the Democrats and demand that Congress surrender completely and reopen the government on Trump’s terms.
This expresses the true function of the union bureaucracy as a prop of class rule. The corrupt, upper-middle class lackeys that populate the apparatus work with the government and the corporations to hold back, frustrate, and betray workers, preventing social anger from coalescing into a mass movement.
This is why the Socialist Equality Party calls for the building of rank-and-file committees in every workplace, neighborhood and school—linked through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC)—to coordinate the growing struggles of workers and youth. These committees must demand the immediate restoration of food assistance, an end to all layoffs, and the reorganization of economic life to meet social needs, not private profit.
Workers must demand the dismantling of the Pentagon war machine and the reallocation of its more than $1 trillion annual budget to meet urgent social needs—ensuring food, housing, healthcare, education, and decent-paying jobs for all. The entire apparatus of repression must be abolished, beginning with the dismantling of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and an immediate end to the anti-immigrant raids and deportations that have terrorized working-class communities across the country.
The fight against hunger, poverty, and dictatorship is inseparable from the fight against capitalism itself. The working class, united internationally, must take power into its own hands, expropriate the oligarchs, and build a socialist society based on equality, human dignity, and genuine democracy.