It’s been said that no amount of reasoning will convince hard-core Trump supporters that they made a bad choice by voting for him. A recent Gallop Poll showed Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is currently at 85 percent.
However, this poll doesn’t address the issue of how many of that 85% will ignore just about any outlandish or egregious policy decisions he can throw at the American people. Or our steadfast friendly nations given his recent trade tariffs.
Furthermore, 81% of white Evangelical Christians voted for Trump. They overlooked his “grab ‘em by the pussy” comment and voted for him any way.
Those people have only two common denominators with Trump: immigration and abortion.
So is there any possibility that something will change their minds? Good question.
I propose this: ask them if
- they know a single mom struggling to support her children and provide food, shelter.and health care while working in a low paying job.
- that mother receives food stamps.
- she receives housing subsidies.
- she receives medicaid benefits.
- that without these subsidies, she won’t be able to pay her rent and will become homeless.
The Trump administration’s policies are widening the gap between the poorest and richest Americans. Their proposals to for cuts in food stamps, housing subsidies and medicaid will have drastic results for the people who really need them.
That single, working mother could quite possibly be unable to provide shelter for her family. In short, she could become homeless, all thanks to Trump’s Make America Great Again.
On food stamps:
“Fourty-four million Americans currently benefit from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program each month—an annual cost of $70.9 billion, or less than 2 percent of the entire federal budget. But the new study by The Urban Institute, a non-partisan think tank, shows that SNAP is the sole food source for 8.5 million American families—and roughly 41 million people in America, up 5 million from 2008, are considered “food insecure” because they lack reliable access to affordable, nutritious food. This problem affects rural and urban America equally.
Donald Trump is proposing a 30-percent cut to the nutrition program’s budget that could further reduce American productivity and health.” – Newsweek 2/22/2018
On housing subsidies:
“The White House’s Fiscal Year 2019 budget proposal, released Monday, calls for work requirements for those who receive public housing subsidies and slashes funding for the Department of Housing and Urban Development by $8.8 billion.
Current rules require tenants receiving subsidies to pay at least 30 percent of their income on housing after deducting certain expenses such as medical and child care payments.
The Trump administration does away with those deductions and additionally calls to raise the floor to 35 percent “for all work-able households.” – NPR 2/13/2018
On Medicaid:
“States seeking waivers for work requirements and other restrictions are estimating as much as an 8 percent or 15 percent cut to their Medicaid rolls. Not every Medicaid recipient, not even most, will be subjected to some of these harsher rules. But there is a sizable population who could soon face a real risk of losing health coverage. But that still leaves about 25 million non-disabled, non-elderly adults who could potentially be subject to work requirements and other eligibility conditions, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s estimates. That figure is a starting point for understanding how much the Trump administration could pare back the Medicaid rolls.” – Vox 3/5/2018
A UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, spent 10 days touring America to study poverty levels. Following the tour, the UN released a report in which it said,
- The United States is one of the world’s richest and most powerful and technologically innovative countries; but neither its wealth nor its power nor its technology is being harnessed to address the situation in which 40 million people continue to live in poverty.
- By most indicators, the US is one of the world’s wealthiest countries. It spends more on national defense than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France and Japan combined.
- US infant mortality rates in 2013 were the highest in the developed world.
- From 2009 to 2015, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans captured 52 percent of total real-income growth, according to the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, leaving the scraps for the remaining 99 percent of households to fight over.
It’s hard to see how Trump’s economic policies can rectify that. Under his tax proposal, the wealthy would get the biggest break. The top 1 percent of earners could see a 16 percent boost in after-tax income, while the lowest 80 percent would get a maximum 1.9 percent bump, according to the Tax Foundation’s analysis.” – Reuters December 29, 2016 “American inequality will widen under Trump in 2017“
In short. Trump gave his millionaire/billionaire cronies (and corporations) a huge tax break while the middle and lower class families, many of whom voted for him, got screwed.
So if you ask those questions to an intractable Trump supporter. and they say they know a struggling mother/family be sure to remind them that a good Christian wouldn’t abandon these people to destitution. That a good Christian would see to it that no family, no mother, no child will go hungry, will have no health care or will be homeless.
And you don’t necessarily have to be Christian, just somebody with a heart and compassion. Do you think for a minute that the man in the White House has either?