Lines at the food pantry, billionaires at the White House

Capital Area Food Bank volunteers provide food to federal workers during the government shutdown in Beltsville, Md., Oct. 25, 2025. (Lawren Simmons/The New York Times)

By JESS BIDGOOD

The longest government shutdown in American history is over, but there are two sets of images from these past 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 Donald 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. Below, I explain how.

Sharp cuts in aid to the poor

When 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 1 in 8 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.

The New York Times’ Tony Romm wrote Wednesday 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 friends

Trump, 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.

On Wednesday night, for example, he is slated to host a private White House dinner with Wall Street executives including 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, the Times’ 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.