STARVE THEM OUT

Unable to deliver ten million deportations, Trump discovered a quicker fix: cut off food, squeeze blue states, and let hunger succeed where policy never could.

Guest article by Michael Cohen. Remember to follow him on Substack for more by clicking here. Michael is now under 4K followers away from 500,000 on YouTube! Subscribe today for free here. Let’s do this!

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

From the very beginning, anyone paying attention—meaning anyone not wearing a red hat and chanting like they were at a political monster-truck rally—knew Trump’s Mass-Deportation Now promises were a mathematical joke wrapped in a moral disaster. When he stomped onto the 2024 campaign stage hollering about removing ten million undocumented migrants, the rest of us weren’t cheering. We were grabbing our foreheads, asking what kind of nation openly campaigns on human purges in the first place.

But reality, as always, has a way of catching up.
And Trump, now one year into his second term, is learning once again that you can’t bend it to your will, no matter how loud you shout or how many sycophants clap on cue.

Because here’s the truth: the ten-million deportation fantasy was never achievable. Not with ICE on overtime, not with Stephen Miller hunched over a whiteboard like a villain mapping out his final act, not with every bus, train, and box truck in America commandeered for the effort. It was never real. It was performance.

So what does Trump do when his own absurd promise meets the brick wall of logistics and basic arithmetic?

Simple.
He goes darker.
He finds a workaround no one asked for, rooted in cruelty instead of competence.

If you can’t deport them fast enough… Starve Them Out.

That’s the new plan—crude, vindictive, and disturbingly on brand.

Enter Brooke Rollins of the USDA, announcing that any state refusing to hand over their SNAP data, including immigration status, will have their food aid frozen. Not reduced. Not reviewed. Frozen, like someone put the entire anti-hunger budget in the back of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago freezer next to a box of Trump Steaks circa 2010.

Translation:
Give us your immigrant information or your residents—children, seniors, working families—don’t eat.

This isn’t policy.
It’s extortion with a USDA letterhead.

Sure, they’re spinning it as a crackdown on fraud. They shout “fraud!” louder than a toddler yelling “mine!” but offer no evidence. Republican-led states complied. Democratic-led states like New York, California, and Minnesota said no; they’re not interested in turning food assistance into an immigration checkpoint.

So Trump’s USDA threatened to choke off the money.

Let’s be clear:
Millions of American citizens—citizens—stand to lose access to food so Trump can pressure states to help him fake progress on an impossible deportation quota.

It’s authoritarian creativity at work. Hunger as public policy. A social safety net repurposed into an immigration weapon.

And it doesn’t stop there. It fits seamlessly into his second-term tactic of withholding federal funds from Democratic-led cities—especially those led by Black mayors—whenever they refuse to play his game. He froze infrastructure funds. He stalled transit money. Now he’s targeting the ability of low-income families to buy milk and bread.

This isn’t deportation.
It’s coercion.
It’s the federal government saying, “Comply… or your people suffer.”

But if you look closely, you see the genius—the Machiavellian efficiency—behind it.
He can pretend the program is working.
People driven into the shadows? “Success.”
SNAP rolls shrinking because of frozen benefits? “Proof the fraud crackdown is real.”
States bullied into submission? “A big win for the taxpayer.”

In Trump World, cruelty doesn’t just serve a purpose; it is the purpose.

He promised mass deportation.
He couldn’t deliver mass deportation.
So he pivoted to deprivation instead:
Not deport.
Not detain.
Deprive.

Make life unlivable. Make hunger a tool. Make fear the engine.
Drive people out—or underground—so he can slap a gold-plated “Mission Accomplished” sticker on the rubble.

Once again, millions of low-income Americans who had nothing to do with immigration policy become collateral damage. Their meals are bargaining chips. Their hunger is leverage. Their health is expendable.

Trump is keeping his campaign promise the only way he knows how:
not by achieving it…
but by punishing anyone who stands in the way of pretending he did.

He already reclaimed the Oval Office.
He already reshaped federal agencies into tools of punishment.
And now he’s deploying the one tactic that leaves no fingerprints: starve them, then deny responsibility.

The only question left is whether the rest of the country has the stomach to watch him do it.

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