The Hunger Games: Trump Edition

A president ordered by a judge to feed his citizens, an economy that only works in his imagination, and Epstein’s ghost haunting every gilded room.

Good morning! Donald Trump spent the week insisting that all is well. Grocery prices are down, electricity is down, cars are down, gas is down, and Thanksgiving will apparently be cheaper than at any point since the Mayflower docked. He told this to foreign dignitaries over dinner as if reading aloud from a parallel universe, citing a “very powerful report” from Walmart that somehow proves the cost of living has plummeted under his leadership.

The problem? The “powerful report” was a sales promotion for a stripped-down holiday meal. Walmart’s “for-ten-under-forty-bucks” feast includes six fewer items than last year’s and relies on generic brands and shrinkflation as a marketing trick, not economic policy. But in Trump’s America, coupons have replaced data, and the difference between a discount and a delusion has been erased by executive order.

BBC Verify fact-checked the president’s economic fairy tales and found the story rotting on the shelf. Grocery prices have risen 2.7 percent since he took office, with coffee up nearly 19 percent and ground beef up 13. His 50 percent tariff on Brazilian beans hasn’t brought relief so much as higher prices and empty shelves. Electricity, which he promised to cut in half, has instead climbed 11 percent while his war on renewables kneecaps supply. Cars now cost over $50,000 on average, gas remains well above $3 a gallon, and his tariff tantrums have added at least another percentage point to inflation.

And then there’s food. Not prices this time, but access. A federal judge in Rhode Island had to order the president of the United States to feed his citizens, ruling that the Trump administration’s refusal to release full November SNAP benefits was causing “irreparable harm.” Judge John McConnell called out the USDA’s incompetence, noting that 42 million Americans were on the brink of hunger because the government couldn’t be bothered to push a button.

The administration tried to pass off “partial payments” as progress, Washingtonese for “we did nothing and wrote a memo about it.” McConnell wasn’t buying it. In a scathing ruling, he ordered the USDA to draw immediately from both the $5.5 billion contingency fund and the $23 billion Section 32 fund (normally used for school lunches and child nutrition) to make full payments by Friday, November 7. He rejected the USDA’s claim that doing so would “hurt school meals,” calling the argument “contrary to the evidence and implausible.” The math was simple, he said: use about $4 billion to feed families now, and there’s still $19 billion left to keep every child fed through spring.

Trump, naturally, responded not with compliance but with bravado, posting on Truth Social that SNAP payments would resume only “when the government opens.” In the real world, families are waiting in food-bank lines that stretch down city blocks while volunteers ration carrots, frozen pork, and patience. It took a federal judge to remind the self-proclaimed champion of the working class that the job of president includes feeding the people, not starving them for leverage.

The human fallout reads like a national elegy. In Colorado, a mother of four sat through a two-hour car line to feed her kids. In Houston, a barber skips meals so his children can eat, wondering whether the half-payments Trump promised will ever appear. In Illinois, a cosmetology student lives on noodles and granola bars. In Virginia, a home-health aide thanks the state for fronting its own money because the federal government won’t. It’s the first interruption in the 61-year history of SNAP, and the president who promised to make America great again has instead made it hungry again.

At that Central Asia dinner, Trump bragged of “$2 trillion dollars pouring into our country” and unveiled something called the “Trump Route for International Peace.” He also congratulated himself for ending eight wars, possibly in his head. His guests politely applauded while waiting for the soup course. When asked about the federal judge’s order to pay SNAP benefits, Vice President J.D. Vance called it “an absurd ruling”, because apparently feeding the poor during a shutdown is judicial overreach.

Trump concluded by declaring that he no longer wants to hear about “affordability.” “Everything is affordable,” he insisted, adding that he’s “made everybody’s life in America great.” Thanksgiving, he said, costs “25 percent less” than under Biden thanks to him.

He even bragged that “energy costs are way down, groceries are way down, everything is way down, and the press doesn’t report it.” Which is technically true, the press doesn’t report it because it’s not real. When asked about inflation, he declared “we have virtually no inflation at all,” a bold statement in a nation where the price of coffee has jumped nearly 19 percent and beef nearly 13. The man has managed to redefine economic strength as collective delusion: if people can’t afford food, the problem must be that they keep talking about it.

For Trump, the data, the grocery lines, even the hunger are all personal insults to be waved away like bad ratings. Reality itself has become unaffordable, and he’s paying for it with overdraft fees in truth.

While Americans line up for free carrots, the Pentagon is busy dropping bombs on boats. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proudly announced another “narco-terrorist” strike in the Caribbean, killing three more people and bringing the total death toll of the administration’s maritime crusade to 70. Eighteen vessels destroyed, zero public proof that any carried drugs, and a growing suspicion that the targets were fishermen unlucky enough to exist within range of an F-35. Congress tried to rein Trump in with a war-powers resolution; Senate Republicans killed it. Now the White House claims the U.S. is in an “armed conflict with Latin American cartels,” which conveniently extends presidential powers without oversight. Nothing says peace through strength like unmarked corpses bobbing in international waters.

While Washington lobs missiles at dinghies, China quietly commissioned the Fujian, its first fully home-built aircraft carrier and the only other ship in the world with electromagnetic catapults. Xi Jinping presided over the launch on Hainan Island, 2,000 uniformed officers cheering the arrival of a supercarrier that can fling stealth fighters and early-warning planes off its deck with precision. America still has more carriers and nuclear engines, but Beijing now owns the symbolism of momentum. The Fujian is conventionally powered but politically nuclear, a declaration that the Pacific no longer belongs solely to the United States.

And still, the Epstein files hover over Washington like a storm that never clears. The BBC reported this week that Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have invited Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, now just a man with lawyers, to testify under oath about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. They can’t compel him to appear, but they don’t have to: the court of public opinion already has its subpoena out. In a newly unearthed 2011 email, Andrew told Epstein, “We are in this together.” The committee would like to know exactly what that meant.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the Trump administration is quietly sweating. Raw Story reports that House Republicans have been warned by Justice Department contacts that the unreleased Epstein files are “even worse for Trump than they thought.” Former MSNBC correspondent David Shuster says the rumor tearing through the GOP caucus is that FBI and DOJ officials privately confirmed the existence of photos showing Trump with half-naked teenage girls, the same Polaroids that Trump biographer Michael Wolff described last month, claiming Epstein laid them out “like a deck of cards.”

The panic crescendoed during Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Senate testimony, when she refused to answer Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s question about whether she had personally seen the photos after Epstein’s safe was seized. Instead of denying it, Bondi lashed out about campaign donations, which, as Whitehouse later pointed out, don’t even exist. “She didn’t give a denial,” Shuster noted drily.

Republicans are reportedly spooked enough that over a hundred are preparing to break ranks and sign the bipartisan discharge petition from Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, forcing a floor vote to release the Epstein files. The petition only needs one more signature, Adelita Grijalva, the newly elected Arizona Democrat who’s promised to be number 218 as soon as she’s sworn in. In other words, the dam is about to break.

The whispers now aren’t just about the names in Epstein’s black book, but the images in his safe, and how much the DOJ already knows. If these files are as damning as insiders say, it’s no wonder Trump’s been lashing out, purging investigators, and declaring the matter “closed.” It’s not just a scandal anymore; it’s a countdown.

Which brings us back to that haunting Oval Office image, Trump standing motionless as a pharmaceutical executive collapses at his feet during his Ozempic-price press event. Staffers rush to help; cameras freeze; Trump stares ahead, blank as marble. It’s a portrait of governance by vacancy: empathy outsourced, conscience redacted, reality optional.

The week ends there: a hungry nation, a bombing campaign with no evidence, a rising China, and a president who swears everything’s affordable, except humanity.