A Shutdown, SNAP Cuts, and the Rising Tide of Anti-Trump Resistance

The US federal government shutdown has now entered its second month, a grinding stalemate that has laid off hundreds of thousands and slashed federal services. But November 1 marked a grim milestone: the abrupt cutoff of SNAP benefits – the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme, once called food stamps – for over 42 million Americans. In at least 25 states, families, seniors, and the working poor will confront empty shelves without the $187 monthly lifeline that sustains them. Food banks, buckling under a 100% surge in calls are struggling to cope. In Republican strongholds like Texas and Arkansas, GOP governors blame "Washington Democrats" even as their own party's "One Big Beautiful Act" engineered the $186 billion decimation of social spending over a decade. 

This is no mere oversight; it is the calculated effect of elite-engineered austerity, a policy script long rehearsed in the boardrooms of Wall Street corporations, their philanthropies and the war rooms of congressional hawks.

The mechanics of these elite networks range from the Rockefeller Foundation's orchestration of Cold War containment, the Ford Foundation’s collaborations with the CIA, to the Heritage Foundation's Project2025 blueprint for today's ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’. This is not bureaucratic inertia but a deliberate assault on what’s left of the social contract, revealing the dark heart of the American dream in the neoliberal era. Abroad, Washington preaches to the world as an example to be emulated; at home, it engineers hunger to enforce "personal responsibility" on the structurally disenfranchised. 

Yet this moment is not isolated but part of a burgeoning upsurge of opposition to Trumpism – a popular insurgency rekindled by the "No Kings" protests that drew millions to the streets just weeks ago, signalling a further twist in the empire's internal unravelling; or, perhaps, self-conscious elite reconstruction?

And where are the Democrats when it comes to taking on Trump’s draconian policies against working people on almost every front? Asking for votes on the basis that they are not Donald Trump. The same playbook as 2016, 2020, and 2024. Their crisis of leadership and near total reliance on corporate donations means that in Trump’s full-on corporate-fuelled class war, working people cannot rely on the Democratic party which, in the end, is an election machine designed to keep them in office, not a vehicle for radical change on behalf of ordinary people.

The Democrats are in such disarray that they are already treating Barack Obama as the representative of some mythical golden age, forgetting that Obama paved the way to Donald Trump and Trumpism.

The SNAP catastrophe: Class warfare writ large

The SNAP implosion is textbook elite deflection. The "One Big Beautiful Act," a Republican megabill, not only guts $186 billion from the programme but erects eligibility barriers that disproportionately hit the vulnerable: diabetics rationing insulin alongside meals, hypertensives courting strokes from nutritional voids, single parents of teens juggling impossible work mandates amid childcare crises.

Over 42 million Americans – disproportionately in the South's red heartlands—face meal-skipping since 1 November. This engineered scarcity echoes Reagan's welfare demonisation in the MAGA era: hunger as moral education; the poor as failures. The top 1% reap tax windfalls – corporate rates slashed to 15% – while chronic illness patients live precariously on the edges of malnutrition, their conditions exacerbated.

This is elite realpolitik exposed: think tanks like Heritage, bankrolled by Koch networks, frame cuts as "debt discipline," while Democrats await the mid-terms to reap the benefits of discontent. The result? A microcosm of domestic hegemony's decay, where austerity weapons try to break unions and silence dissent.

The shutdown: Austerity is an anti-democratic weapon

Step back and the shutdown reveals its broader architecture: 800,000 federal workers unpaid, contractors in limbo, the second-longest impasse in history now a cudgel against public-sector resistance. Transportation Security Administration screeners and air traffic controllers – deemed "essential" – toil without pay, their families mirroring the SNAP precariat. Yet this pain is purposive, a Heritage-scripted "discipline" that disciplines labour while elites amass greater wealth.

Anti-Trump protests surge

But the mass of ordinary people are seething. Just a couple of weeks ago, the "No Kings" protests erupted nationwide—over 2,700 events across all 50 states, drawing an estimated 7 million people, surpassing June's mobilisation by 2 million. This was the largest single day set of mass demonstrations in US history. Organised by coalitions like Indivisible, MoveOn, 50501, plus a lot more unaffiliated but angry Americans, these were no scattershot outbursts but a visceral rejection of Trump’s monarchical pretensions: "No Kings" chants echoed from Times Square's to San Francisco, not to mention MAGA America.

These protests, billed as "No Kings Day," channelled fury at Trump's authoritarian drift: National Guard deployments in Chicago and Los Angeles to quash immigration dissent; attacks on press freedoms; oligarchic entanglements with Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg at the inauguration. Organisers slammed "militarisation of citizens" and "brazen corruption," framing the shutdown as part of an authoritarian consolidation.

A demonstrator holds a sign during a "No Kings" protest, Saturday, June 14, 2025, in Atlanta. Photo: AP/PTI.

Publically, Republicans sneered – House Speaker Mike Johnson dubbed it the "hate America rally," Trump posting AI videos of a crowned self-bombing protesters with "brown liquid" – but the streets pulsed with anger and hope. This was resistance as renewal, a carnivalesque reminder that power resides with the people. Privately, Republicans are shaken by the whirlwind they’ve sowed.

From Rockefeller's anti-communist foundations to AEI's shutdown strategies, elite suppression thrives until mass eruption. The "No Kings" wave—third since Trump's return—signals that eruption's brink, amplified by the spectre of SNAP's destruction. Protesters now link hunger cuts to broader erosions: transgender military bans, Epstein file silences, Insurrection Act whispers for 2026. Protestors are effectively saying "We cannot count on Congress... We are fighting."

Electoral reckoning: Voter fury as Trumpism's undoing

Tuesday's off-year contests – Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, California's Proposition 50 – loom as referenda on this maelstrom. The SNAP famine turbocharges turnout, channelling "No Kings" rage into the voting booth. In Virginia, a bellwether suburbia of federal workers, Abigail Spanberger surges to a 51-41% lead over Winsome Earle-Sears; North Virginia’s protests swelled with "Resist Fascism" and “We are Antifa” banners. New Jersey's Mikie Sherrill edges Jack Ciattarelli 51-42%, women breaking 18 points amid food insecurity – echoing the D.C. marches.

New York City's mayoral race crystallises urban insurgency. Zohran Mamdani's 43-33% edge over Democratic establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo rides in on SNAP panic in Bronx and Queens, where one in five stamp-dependent voters shattered 2021 early-voting records with 480,000 ballots. Mamdani's universal childcare and rent caps inspire, while Cuomo's $5 million consulting fees reek of "the swamp". A win fractures Democratic elites, empowering DSA against Wall Street – much as "No Kings" fractured MAGA complacency.

California's Proposition 50, polling 52-41% in favour, counters Texas's GOP gerrymander netting five Trump seats. Newsom's "not unilateral disarmament" rings true against Missouri and Indiana's map wars, potentially flipping five House seats for Democrats. Silicon Valley and unions flood millions in, risking trust's erosion in a gerrymander arms race. Yet passivity invites annihilation; Prop 50 weaponises blue power, mirroring "No Kings'" call to "defend democratic norms." A Democratic sweep signals 2026 as a Trump referendum, potentially flipping 15 seats.

But a Democratic party that runs on a negative platform of NOT being Trump will ultimately fail their desperate voters, and provide fodder to Trumpists at the alleged ‘failures of socialism’, as the extreme Right vacuums up greater support for their class war on behalf of the richest 1%.

The upsurge against Trumpism: From streets to structural reckoning

These flashpoints expose elite fragility. Networks that conjured up containment now script shutdowns, but streets are erupting. 

Tuesday’s series of elections could catalyse the movement against Donald Trump: SNAP rage could flip suburbs, Mamdani flip cities, Prop 50 turbocharges 2026. But absent surgery – mandatory SNAP entitlement, public campaign finance reform to gut the power of Big Money, gerrymander moratoriums—the machine persists, elites feast as democracy starves. The "No Kings" upsurge, from blimps to ballots, heralds that persistence's peril. Power yields not to pleas but pressure, threatening to give the empire a bloody nose.

Inderjeet Parmar is a professor of international politics and associate dean of research in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City St George’s, University of London, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and writes the American Imperium column at The Wire. He is an International Fellow at the ROADS Initiative think tank, Islamabad, on the board of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences, USA, and on the advisory board of INCT-INEU, Brazil. Author of several books including Foundations of the American Century, he is currently writing a book on the history, politics, and crises of the US foreign policy establishment.

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