By Ben Meiselas
When you cover this Trump presidency day in and day out, you begin to recognize their pattern: create the crisis, inflict the harm, then blame the very people trying to stop the bleeding. The past few weeks have offered one of the clearest, and cruelest, examples yet. As Republican Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson scrambled to defend his role in blocking food assistance for millions of Americans, I spoke with Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell, one of the Democratic AGs leading the lawsuits to stop Donald Trump from starving vulnerable families during the shutdown.
The contrast between the rhetoric coming out of Mar-a-Lago and the reality on the ground could not be starker.
I opened my report by laying out what Johnson and Trump did in plain terms: “Was it taking away their SNAP benefits while at a Great Gatsby–themed party at Mar-a-Lago with half-naked women in martini glasses? While you’re holding a Bible?” And then pretending Democrats were to blame for the resulting disaster? That level of gaslighting would be laughable if it weren’t so lethal.
Johnson went on TV insisting that “the president… worked around the clock… to mitigate the pain.” Meanwhile, Trump stood in the Oval Office proclaiming that Democrats “cut off food stamp benefits for millions,” ignoring the indisputable fact that Trump himself filed emergency briefs with the Supreme Court to block those benefits, funding that already existed and had been used in every prior shutdown in American history.
As I told viewers, watching them claim credit for benefits they tried to eliminate is like watching an arsonist blame the firefighters for the fire.
That’s when I brought in Attorney General Campbell, whose outrage comes from witnessing the fallout firsthand. “Cruel, inhuman, unconscionable,” she said. “And frankly, what you heard from the president and the speaker is total bullshit.” She recounted seniors on fixed incomes going hungry, and a mother in Massachusetts who skipped meals so her child could eat. These were consequences of deliberate policy choices.
Campbell described how she mobilized 25 attorneys general and three governors in a multistate lawsuit after Trump’s USDA abruptly reversed course and announced, just a week before November, that it would withhold SNAP payments. “Never in the history of this country… has the federal government ever stopped funding SNAP during a shutdown,” she emphasized. It was only because Democratic AGs sued that the benefits eventually flowed. Without their action, she said, “people would be starving in this country.”
And it didn’t stop there. Even after courts ruled in the states’ favor, Trump’s Justice Department tried to block the payments again, this time at the Supreme Court.
Campbell widened the lens, explaining how Democratic AGs have had to form the last line of defense against a federal government openly hostile to its own people. She noted that Massachusetts alone has filed more than 40 lawsuits to stop Trump from stripping billions in state investment, from clinical trials to public school funding to climate resilience projects. Of the $3.24 billion Trump tried to claw back, Democratic AGs have protected $3.02 billion.
“Not one Republican AG,” she noted, has joined a single lawsuit to defend clinical trials, food assistance, or basic public services. The result? Residents in GOP-led states went without benefits their own leaders refused to fight for.
Toward the end of our conversation, we discussed the broader collapse of legal norms under Trump, highlighted by the bizarre grand jury proceedings overseen by Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance lawyer appointed as a top federal prosecutor despite lacking prosecutorial experience. When the federal judge reviewing her case asked why transcripts were missing for key portions of the proceeding, Halligan had no answers. As Campbell warned, this is what it looks like when a justice system becomes unmoored from the Constitution: “If you don’t have a constitution, you don’t have a guarantee that this government owes you anything.”
That, ultimately, is why Democratic AGs have become indispensable. They are not just defending programs. They are defending the very idea of a government that serves its people.
As we wrapped, Campbell put it simply: “We understand our jobs, and most importantly, we love this country. We’re not going to allow this president to dismantle everything we stand for.”
Watch my interview with AG Campbell above. Thanks to you, these messages are reaching more people than ever. So keep liking. Keep sharing. Keep listening to the MeidasTouch Podcast, on platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify (or any audio podcast platform), and please tell a friend. Let keep this momentum going and save our democracy.
