Good evening. Washington is again consumed with the Epstein files. We’ll catch you up, and I’ll take a look at the deep contrast between President Trump’s treatment of the rich and the poor during the government shutdown. The latest on the Epstein files
Lines at the food pantry, billionaires at the White House
The longest government shutdown in American history appears to be coming to an end, but there are two sets of images from these last few weeks that could endure well beyond it. The first shows the lines snaking out of food pantries after the Trump administration chose not to use available funds to keep full food stamp benefits flowing to millions of poor Americans this month, and fought the federal rulings requiring it to make full benefits available. The second, released on social media by President Trump himself, shows his gleaming new bathroom in the Lincoln Bedroom, renovated in gold fixtures and marble. Democrats forced the shutdown to put Republicans on defense over the rising cost of health care, then caved without securing a tangible policy victory. But the shutdown also highlighted the striking difference in the president’s treatment of the rich and the poor, practically laying out his opponents’ attacks on a gilded platter as they race to hammer the administration more broadly over America’s affordability problem. Tonight, I’ll explain how. Sharp cuts in aid to the poorWhen the shutdown began, Trump vowed to use it to “get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want,” saying that those things would be “Democrat things.” One of those things turned out to be federal help for the hungry, called SNAP benefits, which one in eight Americans rely on to buy groceries. Those benefits kept flowing for the first several weeks of the shutdown. But late last month, the administration said it would not tap into a $5 billion emergency reserve to cover benefits in November, kicking off weeks of legal wrangling in which the administration fought food stamp funding at every step — including telling states to “undo” any work they had done to keep full benefits flowing this past weekend. My colleague Tony Romm has an important story today about how the unprecedented lapse in funding is bigger than the 43-day government shutdown, because it “seemed to erode the fundamental guarantee that the government would protect the most vulnerable families from harm.” The administration had already moved to take a bite out of SNAP with its signature domestic policy law, which added strict new work requirements that could effectively force 2.4 million people out of the program, either because they do not meet those requirements or didn’t produce the paperwork to prove it. That law makes sharp cuts to Medicaid by scaling back the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of coverage for the working poor. Party time for rich donors and friendsTrump, whose administration is stocked with billionaires, has shown few reservations about cozying up to the wealthy during the government shutdown — nor about the optics of turning the White House into an opulent playground while it was going on. Tonight, for example, he is slated to host a private White House dinner with Wall Street executives like Jamie Dimon. He held a dinner for donors to his White House ballroom project about two weeks into the government shutdown. And then, of course, he attended a glitzy Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, where guests dressed as flappers and the theme was “A little party never killed nobody” — a line from a song in the film version of “The Great Gatsby.” But after Republican candidates were flattened in last week’s off-year elections by Democrats talking about the cost of living, Trump has taken some steps, my colleague Erica Green wrote this week, that suggest he knows he needs to be a better messenger on affordability. Over the weekend, he wrote on social media that “everyone” (aside from “high income people”) would get tariff “dividend” checks of $2,000 per person — a disbursement that recalls the pandemic relief checks he mailed to Americans during his first term. Last week, he announced a plan to lower the cost of popular weight-loss drugs. He recently claimed, inaccurately, that there is “almost no inflation.” Trump is a president who rose to power by fashioning himself as a populist, and who won a second term in part by promising to lower costs. Democrats have long struggled to poke holes in this image — but they might not have expected him to poke a few himself during the shutdown. QUOTE OF THE DAY “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump.”That was Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender, in an email to Ghislaine Maxwell in 2011. The message suggests that Epstein believed Trump knew more about his sex-trafficking operation than the president has ever acknowledged. Epstein wrote that an unnamed victim had “spent hours at my house with him” but that Trump “has never once been mentioned.” Got a tip? ONE NUMBER
67 percentThat’s the share of Americans who disapprove of how President Trump is managing the federal government. Ruth Igielnik, The Times’s polling editor, explains. That figure has increased by 10 percentage points since March, according to a new AP/NORC poll. The drop among those who approve of how he’s doing has been particularly stark within his own party. Just 68 percent of Republicans now say they approve of how Trump is handling the federal government, down from 81 percent in March. The vast majority of Democrats continue to express their disapproval. Overall, Trump’s approval ratings have slowly fallen over the last several weeks, according to The New York Times’s polling average. His approval rating is now around 41 percent, a second-term low for him.
Could Ohio and Florida be the next frontier for women in politics?Female lawmakers make up nearly half of California’s Legislature, but it wasn’t always that way. Now, the group that helped make it so is setting its sights on two red states. My colleague Laurel Rosenhall explains. The change in California — where politics long felt like a boys’ club, with women making up just 22 percent of state lawmakers as recently as 2017 — is largely the result of a strategic effort to recruit Democratic women to run in open races, led by a group called Close the Gap. Today the organization will announce that it is bringing its model to Ohio and Florida. Those states’ Republican-controlled legislatures may not seem to have much in common with California’s Democratic supermajority. But Close the Gap sees an opportunity because term limits in Ohio and Florida will create a bumper crop of open seats between 2028 and 2030. And recruiting Democratic women to run before a wave of men hit their term limits was crucial to the group’s success in California. Another reason the group has targeted Ohio and Florida: Majorities in both states supported recent ballot measures on abortion rights, showing that voters are more moderate on the issue than their conservative state lawmakers. ONE LAST THING R.I.P., the pennyThe final versions of the coin were minted in Philadelphia today, after President Trump ordered the Treasury Department to end its use. The penny’s causes of death, Victor Mather writes, were irrelevance and expensiveness. The 1-cent coin couldn’t buy much of anything anymore, and the cost of making it had risen to more than 3 cents. Taylor Robinson and Ama Sarpomaa contributed reporting. Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up |
