Trump Policies Don't Benefit Working-Class.
Trump Says He’ll Fight for Working-Class Americans. His First Presidency Suggests He Won’t.
Story by Eli Hager. November 2, 2024.
- Trump’s Policies on Poverty: During his presidency, Trump proposed significant cuts to programs aiding low-income families, including health care, food assistance, and housing programs.
- Project 2025: Critics cite this as a blueprint for a potential second Trump term, proposing deep cuts to the social safety net and tax breaks for the wealthy.
- First-Term Challenges: Trump faced difficulties implementing his agenda due to inefficiencies and a lack of preparation in his early presidency.
- Future Plans: If re-elected, Trump and his allies plan to combine tax cuts with aggressive cuts to social spending, and to introduce new regulations earlier in the term.
- Raise rent of 4 million poorest people.
- Cut the federal disability benefits of a quarter-million low-income children, on the grounds that someone else in their family was already receiving benefits
- Tried to enact a rule allowing employers to pocket workers’ tips
- Enacted a rule denying overtime pay if they made more than $35,568 a year.
- Proposes deep cuts to the social safety net for lower-income families
- Proposes more large tax breaks for the wealthy
- Advanced an agenda across his administration that was designed to cut health care, food and housing programs and labor protections for poor and working-class Americans
- Proposed significantly deeper cuts to programs for low- and modest-income people than any other president ever has, including Reagan, by far.
- Cutting the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, by billions of dollars.
- Rescinding nearly a million kids’ eligibility for free school lunches.
- Freezing Pell grants for lower-income college students so that they’re not adjusted for inflation.
- Overhauling and substantially cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, colloquially known as food stamps, in part by defining people with assets exceeding $2,250 as not being poor enough to receive aid and reducing the minimum monthly food stamp amount from $23 to zero.
- Eliminating multiple programs designed to increase the supply of and investment in affordable housing in lower-income communities.
- Eliminating a program that helps poor families heat their homes and be prepared for power outages and other energy crises.
- Shrinking Job Corps and cutting funding for work-training programs — which help people get off of government assistance — nearly in half.
- Restricting the collective bargaining rights of unions, through which workers fight for better wages and working conditions.
- Trump also never gave up on his goal of dismantling the Affordable Care Act.
- Continue to reduce the civil service, meaning the nonpolitical federal employees whom he collectively calls “the Deep State”.