A woman whose daughter depends on federal food assistance has torn into the MAGA administration as 42 million Americans now stare down the barrel of a barren Thanksgiving dinner table.
Buffalo resident Betty Szretter, 63, recently retired to take care of her 26-year-old daughter Hannah, who’s suffered from Type 1 diabetes since she was 10 and has since been diagnosed with a mental health condition that leaves her unable to work.
A longtime Donald Trump supporter, Szretter says she now regrets voting for the Republican president at last year’s election. She says her family will no longer receive the $300 a month she needs for food to keep Hannah’s blood sugar levels within a safe range.
“It all seems very selfish,” she told NBC Monday of the Trump administration allowing funding for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which otherwise provides around an eighth of the U.S. population with food stamps, to lapse amid the ongoing government shutdown.
“Now he’s busy out of the country and demolishing the White House,” Szretter added of Trump’s diplomatic tour of Asia toward the end of last month, and his ongoing construction of a $300 million ballroom on what was lately the site of the presidential building’s historic East Wing.
“I believe the Trump administration, instead of focusing on presidential ballrooms, should be paying attention to individual Americans’ dining rooms,” she said in a separate interview with CNN on the same day.
Funding for SNAP expired over the weekend amid what critics warn is likely to soon prove the longest and most devastating federal shutdown on record.
On Friday night, Trump sparked further controversy by hosting a lavish Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago themed around F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 classic The Great Gatsby. Many commentators noted a certain irony, given the book’s status as a Prohibition-era literary critique of the excess and moral vacuity of privilege built upon social inequality.
For well over a month, Republicans and Democrats have remained deadlocked on funding disputes that cut to the heart of the president’s MAGA agenda, from healthcare and foreign aid to infrastructure and public broadcasting.
Economists warn the impasse, which has seen 750,000 federal workers furloughed and hundreds of thousands more working without pay, is already costing the U.S. between $7 billion and $14 billion each week that passes without a resolution.
The MAGA administration has sought to firmly blame Democrats for the hiatus, with multiple government agency websites displaying notices to that effect in what critics have slammed as the blatant defiance of a ban on federal employees engaging in political messaging under the 1939 Hatch Act.
It would not appear to have worked. The latest polls show 52 percent of voters believe Republicans are responsible for the shutdown, against 42 percent who blame Democrats. Trump’s disapproval ratings have meanwhile skyrocketed to their highest-ever level, with 63 percent of Americans now dissatisfied by the job he’s doing in the Oval Office.
While the White House has shrugged off what those numbers may mean for Republican prospects come the midterms, top elected GOP officials are already sounding the alarm over mounting forecasts of an electoral bloodbath next year.
“I can’t see into the future, but I see Republicans losing the House if Americans are continuing to go paycheck-to-paycheck,” Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said in an interview two weeks ago. “They’ll definitely be going into the midterms looking through the lens of their bank account.”
Firebrand Texas Senator Ted Cruz has offered a similarly grim forecast, reflecting on last month’s massive “No Kings” protests against the Trump administration. “Unquestionably, we should take political peril seriously,” he said. “There is a lot of energy. There is a lot of anger on the left. And elections can be dangerous when one side is mobilized, is angry.”
Though the midterms are still a year away, CNN data guru Harry Enten noted Monday that the second Trump administration will face its first major electoral test of the national temperature this week.
As Americans head to the polls Tuesday for a nationwide slate of gubernatorial, legislative and local polls, Enten noted that Trump is proving “a huge, huge drag in all these races.” The president’s ratings currently hold at -11 in New Jersey and -14 in Virginia, which will both shortly see gubernatorial votes cast, and at a whopping -35 in New York, where his hometown of NYC is set to elect its new mayor.
“Why is it that these races are so important?” Enten said Monday. “Well, go back through history, look at what has happened. When Democrats sweep New York City, New Jersey and Virginia governor, they won the U.S. House the next year, five out of five times in the last 90 years. You go all the way back to the FDR administration.”
“When we’re in this national polarized environment and Donald Trump is as unpopular as he is, I think that history is likely to hold,” he added. “If, in fact, Democrats do sweep tomorrow, which at this point looks more likely than not.”
In her interview with CNN, Trump voter Szretter said she does still believe in Trump’s vision of “making America great again” with his hardline stance on immigration. But when it comes to Republican inaction on food security, she’s found it far harder to muster much love for his policies of late.
“He promised to lower prices for Americans, and I don’t see that happening right now,” she told the network. Mindful of her daughter’s health, she added whether she votes red again next year will depend entirely on what the administration does for her pocketbook.
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