Trump’s Big Beautiful Hunger Brings Hurt

Dr. King’s “War on Poverty” has morphed into the U.S. Government’s “War on the Poor” with continuous SNAP and health care, and housing subsidy cuts

In 1993, Tupac Shakur recorded a love letter to Black women in the wreckage of the crack epidemic and called it “Keep Ya Head Up.” In it, he named a truth about American priorities that has never been refuted: “We got money for wars but can’t feed the poor.”

On May 1, more than 150,000 Illinois households began losing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits under new federal work requirements imposed by President Donald Trump’s H.R. 1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” according to Capitol News Illinois. Nationwide, more than 3.5 million Americans have been stripped from the rolls since Trump signed the bill into law on July 4, 2025, fueling Trump’s Big Beautiful Hunger.

Trump celebrated the cuts in this year’s State of the Union address. “We cut a record number of job-killing regulations, and in one year we have lifted 2.4 million Americans, a record, off of food stamps,” he said.

As we analyze the impacts of these policies, it’s important to recognize the broader implications of Trump’s Big Beautiful Hunger on American society.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson rejected that framing.

“At a time when families need more support, the federal government has abandoned its most basic responsibility by gutting the SNAP program, putting millions of people at risk,” Johnson said April 9 at Malcolm X College. “Chicago refuses to accept that.

“One of our workers, who’s a single mother of two children, had her benefits cut,” the mayor continued. “This is something that is literally stopping individuals from being able to feed their children and feed themselves.”

Johnson was distributing $4,500 micro-grants to 67 community organizations and food pantries, absorbing the hunger Washington created.

The same H.R. 1 that cut $187 billion from SNAP over the next decade also allocated $257 million in taxpayer funds to renovate the Kennedy Center, which now bears Trump’s name on its facade and is closing for two years starting July 2026.

While that renovation proceeds, the White House demolished its East Wing to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom projected at $400 million. “When completed, it will be the Greatest and Most Beautiful Ballroom of its kind anywhere in the World [sic],” Trump posted on social media in April 2026.

It isn’t just the president. Senate Republicans are pushing to allocate an additional $1 billion for ballroom security upgrades. “Republicans looked at families drowning in bills and decided what they really needed was more raids and a Trump ballroom,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D- NY) said.

In the same week Chicagoans began losing food benefits, workers were painting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “American flag blue.” Federal contract records reviewed by ABC News show the project has cost nearly $15 million, awarded as a no-bid contract to a firm with no prior federal work. Trump had claimed it would cost $1.5 million.

Meanwhile, the United States has spent at least $25 billion waging Operation Epic Fury against Iran, according to Pentagon testimony before Congress in April 2026. At its peak, the campaign burned through nearly $2 billion a day.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker put numbers on the damage. “Trump and Congressional Republicans sealed one of the largest wealth transfers in American history, stripping health care, food assistance, and other essential supports for working families to fund permanent tax breaks for the wealthy,” he said in September 2025. His budget office confirmed H.R. 1 will cost Illinois $705 million in new SNAP expenses and $6.1 billion in Medicaid revenue losses through 2033.

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle set aside $65 million in county reserves to absorb anticipated federal losses. “The Trump administration is threatening our communities and targeting the very investments that keep families stable and safe,” she said last October.

Independent grocers operating on margins of 1 to 2 percent are warning of closures. “SNAP cuts will put grocers at real risk for closure,” the Illinois Retail Merchants Association told reporters. In Cook County’s food deserts, where Black and Latino families already travel miles for fresh produce, advocates say losing a neighborhood grocer can trigger a full-scale hunger crisis.

H.R. 1 reaches beyond food. The Congressional Budget Office projects 7.8 million Americans will lose Medicaid coverage. Proposed budget cuts would slash HUD by 44 percent, threatening rental assistance for 3.7 million people. A proposed rule would strip approximately 400,000 disabled adults of Supplemental Security Income (SSI). The Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program faces a $1.4 billion cut for 5.4 million mothers and children.

Black non-Hispanic households face a food insecurity rate of 24.4 percent, more than double the 10.1 percent rate for white non-Hispanic households, according to 2024 USDA data. Single mothers carry the heaviest load: 36.8 percent of female-headed households are food insecure, the highest rate of any demographic in the nation.

In Gary, Indiana, where 78 percent of residents are Black and one in three lives below the poverty line, the median household income is $38,731 and life expectancy is 77.4 years, five years below Chicago. Indiana has 588,184 SNAP beneficiaries across 281,112 households.

Indiana State Sen. Shelli Yoder (D-Bloomington) said the state’s cuts go further than what Trump imposed federally. “We’re going to see the impact of hungry kids throughout the summer,” Yoder said. “These cuts are beyond what Hoosiers deserve.”

The contrast between what corporations receive and what the poor are losing is documented. Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla collectively reported $315 billion in U.S. profits in 2025 and paid just 4.9 percent in federal corporate income taxes, saving $51 billion, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Tesla paid zero.

Elon Musk’s businesses have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, and subsidies, according to a Washington Post analysis. Walmart benefits from $6.2 billion per year in indirect taxpayer subsidies because its wages are low enough that workers qualify for SNAP and Medicaid, the programs now being cut. Under H.R. 1, the wealthiest 1 percent will receive at least $1 trillion in tax relief over the next decade.

The pattern is not new. In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asked in “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” a question unanswered 60 years later: “Why are there forty million poor people in a nation overflowing with such unbelievable affluence?” Today, the number is 48 million.

The war on poverty King championed was never funded to succeed. The pattern of stripping aid from the poor runs from the Social Security Act of 1935, which excluded most Black workers, through Reagan’s “welfare queen” mythology, through Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform. Advocates say Trump’s H.R. 1 follows the same blueprint.

The $400 million ballroom is under construction. The reflecting pool is being painted blue. The war in Iran burns through billions. And in Englewood, Roseland and Gary, mothers are trying to feed their children with benefits that are no longer coming.

“They cut me off $71,” a man who had just exited the IDHS office in Woodlawn told the Crusader. Though he declined to give his last name, he identified himself as Joe. “They say I gotta find a job. I’m 57 years old and have been out of work for six years. That $71 don’t hurt nobody. That’s how I eat,” Joe said.  “These women got babies,” he continued, before abruptly ending the conversation, “and they ain’t got no babysitters, can’t find work. Yeah, they’re out here, starving people. But we (are) gonna find a way to eat!’

The mayor of Chicago, the governor of Illinois, and the president of the Cook County Board are demanding that Congress answer for the choice

this nation has made: $25 billion for war, $400 million for a ballroom, $15 million to paint a pool, and silence for the 48 million Americans who cannot afford to eat.

Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Poverty, by America,” has written the diagnosis that fits every dollar documented above. “Poverty persists,” Desmond writes, “because some wish and will it to.”