Trump’s America is governed by necropolitics

Over forty years after its release, Bruce Springsteen’s seminal 1982 album “Nebraska” continues to feel prescient and powerful. Long beloved by music critics and Springsteen devotees, the record has seen a resurgence with director Scott Cooper’s recent biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere,” which explores the singer’s spiritual pain and struggle with depression while he was making “Nebraska.”

With stark songs about a mournful and lost working class serving a broken American dream accompanied by despair and violence, “Nebraska” could serve the album is a soundtrack to our age of Trump — and to the country’s long-unresolved demons that brought the American people to this great nadir.  

Like the desperate characters that populate “Nebraska,” tens of millions of Americans are being told, once again, that their hunger is a private failure, not a public betrayal. The scene is starkly similar to what Springsteen wrote about in one of the album’s most evocative songs — where children play outside “steel gates that completely surround, sir / the mansion on the hill.”

Over the weekend, more than 42 million Americans did not receive their Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Tens of millions of children, the elderly, disabled and other vulnerable people now face a brutal fact: They don’t have enough to eat.

With the lapse in funding pending on Friday, two federal judges in Massachusetts and Rhode Island had quickly ruled that halting SNAP benefits was illegal and ordered the Trump administration to resume payments. In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration would not appeal the ruling, noting that benefits could be restored as early as Wednesday.

“If we are given the appropriate legal direction by the Court, it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding, just like I did with Military and Law Enforcement Pay,” President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post.

Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr., who had issued the Rhode Island decision, praised Trump for appearing to act swiftly: “The Court greatly appreciates the President’s quick and definitive response to this Court’s Order and his desire to provide the necessary SNAP funding.”

On Monday, though, the administration revealed in court filings that it would only be sending partial payments to SNAP recipients. According to the New York Times, it wasn’t evident when families and individuals would receive the funds.

“Food insecurity” is the sterile term used by policy experts to describe hunger in America. In truth, it means fear, pain and not knowing where the next meal will come from. It means a scene like the one I witnessed last week in a Chicago supermarket.

An elderly woman handed her SNAP card to the cashier to pay for a small amount of food — no more than a dozen items. She laughed and said, “I’d better use what little money I have left before it runs out on Saturday.” 

Gallows humor; the fear showed in her voice. The cashier, who in all likelihood does not make a living wage working at this supermarket, took the SNAP card and smiled. Then she too let out a small laugh. I imagine this young woman was also scared. Because like millions of other supermarket employees across the country, she knew she wouldn’t be receiving her benefits either. Two Black women, trauma bonding across the generations, because they wouldn’t be able to buy food in a few days.

Poverty and hunger are forms of structural violence that stunt lives, limit upward social mobility and raise the odds that a hungry child will one day end up in prison. They cause a range of physical, emotional and psychological harm, including shortened lives and death. 

Poverty is a public policy choice. As sociologist Matthew Desmond said in a 2023 interview with Ezra Klein of the New York Times, “[P]overty is not just a line. It’s not just an income level. Poverty is often pain and sickness.” 

What was most powerful about Desmond’s description of endemic poverty is the specific language, images and emotions he used to conjure it. “It’s living in degraded housing. It’s the fear of eviction. It is eviction and the homelessness. It’s getting roughed up by the police sometimes. It’s schools that are just bursting at the seams. It’s neighborhoods where everyone around you is also struggling.” 

Then he got especially real. “It’s death,” he said. “It’s this tight knot of agonies, and humiliations, and social problems, and this is experienced by millions of us in the richest country in the history of the world.”

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By Desmond’s estimate, it would take only $177 billion a year – less than one percent of the GDP – to functionally eliminate poverty in America. By comparison, America’s official national defense budget is more than a trillion dollars a year.

Beneath the fact of poverty in America lies something even more ominous: the ideology of necropolitics.

In necropolitics, governance is primarily viewed through a Social Darwinist lens of survival of the fittest, where certain populations and groups are deemed disposable by the punitive and punishing state. 

The attempts to cut off SNAP benefits and other assistance for marginalized and vulnerable people, along with an historic government shutdown that is causing economic misery for millions, reinforce how necropolitics is the dominant strain of Trump’s political ideology.

The evidence is painfully, abundantly clear. Public health experts estimate that Trump and his Republican Party’s “Big Vile Bill” will cause at least 50,000 unnecessary deaths in the United States each year. Research published in prestigious health and medical journals, such as the JAMA Internal Medicine and The Lancet, have estimated that policies supported and enacted by Republicans have shortened the lives of the American people; a 2022 study conclusively showed that these policies cost more than 200,000 lives each year in the United States. By comparison, policies supported by Democrats would save almost the same number of lives.

Necropolitics is a unifying theme throughout the right’s messaging, symbolism and propaganda as shown by their threats against “the enemy within,” the “poison” in the “blood of the nation,” and online images and videos where Trump, for example, has been depicted as a Dark Jedi from “Star Wars,” a mafia boss and a vanquishing God-king.

The left, along with traditional Never Trump conservatives, often have a difficult time understanding, nevermind accepting, that MAGA is animated by necropolitics and a general disregard for the common good and universal human rights that are foundational for democracy and a humane society.

But this is the bleak reality of the Trumpian Gilded Age, in which the Agriculture Department’s website for information about SNAP benefits announces “the well has run dry.” But it hasn’t. The well is overflowing, as it has always been for the rich and the powerful in America. 

In Springsteen’s song “Atlantic City,” the song’s narrator muses “maybe everything that dies someday comes back.” Perhaps he’s managed to convince himself, and his girl, that things will get better. But in Donald Trump’s America, it’s looking bleak.