Logos of Fox News and SNAP, via Media Matters
Trump announced he won’t pay out SNAP benefits until the government shutdown ends after a Fox host claimed Democrats “are willing to starve people for political power”
Written by Zachary Pleat
Published
After multiple Fox hosts falsely claimed Democrats are to blame for the Trump administration failing to pay out November benefits for recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), President Donald Trump announced in a social media post that he will not pay the benefits until the government shutdown is over.
Trump’s announcement is in apparent defiance of court orders to pay the SNAP benefits that his administration already agreed to.
Though the Trump administration previously indicated that it would pay out SNAP benefits during the government shutdown using existing contingency funds, in late October it issued a new memo stating that it would not use those funds to pay for November benefits.
Multiple Fox personalities supported the administration’s refusal to pay these mandated benefits. On October 31, a federal judge ordered the administration to pay out SNAP benefits for November, and another federal judge ruled its refusal to do so was unlawful. One of the lawsuits was brought by a group of about two-dozen Democratic state attorneys general and governors. The Trump administration on November 2 said in court filings that it would use contingency funds to provide partial SNAP benefits.
Following Friday’s court rulings and the Trump administration's apparent willingness to at least partially comply, multiple Fox hosts throughout the weekend and on Monday shifted to falsely blaming Democrats for the holdup of November SNAP benefits, or in one case, falsely claiming that Trump was doing his best to distribute the payments.
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Trump posted on his Truth Social website that “SNAP BENEFITS … will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!”
Center for American Progress budget expert Bobby Kogan pointed out that Trump is saying he will defy court orders, and Kogan noted that the “easiest explanation is that Trump doesn’t want SNAP benefits to go out.”
When press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about Trump’s post on Tuesday, she claimed the administration is still complying with the court order to pay the SNAP benefits and that Trump was saying he didn’t want to rely on contingency funding in the future.
This is happening as the government shutdown has lasted more than a month under unified Republican control of the federal government. House Speaker Mike Johnson is refusing to bring the House of Representatives into session — possibly to avoid a vote to release government files related to notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, according to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — and Trump is demanding the Republican-controlled Senate eliminate the legislative filibuster to end the shutdown instead of addressing Democrats’ demands to extend expiring health insurance premium tax credits as premium costs skyrocket without them.