Hunger Games: From SNAP to Nigeria
How the Trump regime transformed starvation from crisis to strategy.
After the wave of Democratic victories on election day 2025—which largely focused on affordability—the Trump regime unleashed a new weapon: hunger.
SNAP Out
In spite of a federal court saying the administration is violating an order and is required to fully fund SNAP by Friday—a program that feeds 42 million Americans—JD Vance and Donald Trump laid out their policy on Americans going hungry at a White House dinner Thursday night.
Asked about the court’s order, Vance flat-out refused to acknowledge the power of the judiciary to force the executive to use the emergency $6 billion that is already allocated to SNAP, calling the ruling “absurd”:
“…in the midst of a shutdown, we can’t have a federal court telling the president how he has to triage the situation.”
In point of fact, a federal court can and did tell the president that he has to faithfully execute the law, and spend the funds allocated by Congress. Nevertheless, Trump weighed in with one of those diatribes that leaves you stunned at the raw stupidity, sadism, and lack of shame.
“Our country has to remain very liquid because problems, catastrophes, wars could be anything. We have to remain liquid… It was meant for people that had real problems… A great company Walmart… announced today… Thanksgiving… under Donald Trump as president is 25% less for Thanksgiving… than it was under Sleepy Joe Biden’s administration. So we talk about affordability. I think that’s the best chart.”
Walmart—“Better than any poll”
Trump’s lies are too voluminous to list but his whopper about Walmart is perhaps the most absurd. Citing an annual store promotion, he ludicrously extrapolates that Thanksgiving is suddenly 25% cheaper because Walmart offered a cheaper deal this year with fewer items.
Trump says Walmart’s lower promo price is “better than any poll” and doesn’t want to hear about affordability “because right now we’re much less”—despite the lie’s transparency. Prices and unemployment are rising, and most people know it.
The reality is that Trump is deliberately holding food back from people because he thinks it gives him a political tool to use against Democrats. He thinks if he just makes people miserable enough, eventually people will blame someone besides him.
Food Stamp Machiavelli
This strategy is quintessential Machiavellianism, one of three common characteristics modeled in Dark Triad/Tetrad personality types: the ability to shamelessly manipulate others through scheming and infliction of suffering.
But America was not the only country the president targeted with starvation and retribution, he also took aim at Nigeria.
It’s the Lithium, Not the Christians
Until Donald Trump destroyed American soft power and humanitarian assistance programs, Nigeria was one of the largest beneficiaries of USAID. Nigeria is a massive, complex country with a population split between Muslims and Christians—and between north and south. The conflict between the two groups dates back six decades to the Biafran War—a bloody civil war created by the vacuum left by British colonial rule.
One of the results of USAID programs being cut is that it destabilized the region, giving terrorist groups like the ISIS-backed Boko Haram an incentive to increase violence. The humanitarian systems provided by the United States:
delivered food to refugees and displaced communities
supported farming and recovery
kept clinics open
supported and strengthened local governance
With those programs gone, the vacuum is being filled by jihadist insurgents, who have a new lever in their long war for control.
Despite U.S. abandonment of Nigeria, on Thursday Trump threatened to attack, “guns-a-blazing,” with the U.S. military—to save Christianity from an “existential threat”:
Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. Thousands and thousands of Christians are being killed. Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter. I am hereby making Nigeria a country of particular concern… We’re going to do things to Nigeria that Nigeria is not going to be happy about and may very well go into that now-disgraced country, guns-a-blazing to completely wipe out the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible, horrible atrocities… I’m hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our cherished Christians.
While violence in Nigeria is increasing, in part due to U.S. withdrawal, there is no particular “crisis” erupting, no evidence of a sudden spike beyond existing insurgency trends. This is a manufactured scenario. But why Nigeria?
The clear answer is that, like Trump’s other international target Venezuela, Nigeria is a massive source of natural resources, including oil fields, and a burgeoning supply of lithium. On the same day Trump threatened Nigeria with military intervention, the richest man in the world was awarded a trillion-dollar pay package by Tesla.
Part of Elon Musk’s Tesla shareholder pitch Thursday included promoting a massive lithium refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas. Filling this lithium pipeline with raw material is crucial to Musk receiving his trillion-dollar payout.
Wagging the Dogs
Based on the sequence of policy actions and public propaganda, this appears to be the regime’s plan for Nigeria:
Cut off food and clinics in Nigeria supplied by USAID.
Wait for a humanitarian crisis to erupt as a result.
Point the finger at Muslims.
Send troops in to “rescue Christians.”
Get the oil and lithium.
This serves a number of purposes at once:
Trump gets another war to “solve.”
Christian crusaders like Hegseth get a front in their holy war on Islam.
Imperialists get a new colonial target.
Oligarchs get oil and lithium for their rapacious supply chains.
The regime’s aggression in Venezuela is a mirror of the plan to use a moral panic in Nigeria as an excuse to invade a nation with rich natural resources. Friday morning, the “War Secretary” tweeted about the seventeenth “drug boat” attacked in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
Both overseas and at home, the U.S. government is an authoritarian aggressor openly provoking violence—and using hunger to secure power and resources for itself and its allies.
Starvation as Psychological War
Starvation as a weapon of war and domestic repression is as old as war itself. A hungry population is far easier to manipulate. When the body needs food it produces a hormone called ghrelin which stimulates the amygdala, the fear center, and suppresses the pre-frontal cortex—where reasoning, moral judgment, and executive function are located. This isn’t theoretical, you can measure it on an MRI.
Psychologically, it means people are more vulnerable to persuasion, more prone to emotional arousal, and more likely to experience prolonged hyper-vigilance. This is exactly the kind of population an authoritarian regime needs to carry out wide-scale atrocities.
Holodomor
Among the most deadly examples of weaponizing starvation ever known, the Holodomor was Stalin’s deliberate murder by hunger of at least 5 million Ukrainians—and the simultaneous elimination of competing ideologies.
From Anne Applebaum’s book Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017) (PDF):
[emphasis added]
“…in the autumn of 1932, the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that widened and deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside and at the same time prevented peasants from leaving the republic in search of food.
At the height of the crisis, organized teams of policemen and party activists, motivated by hunger, fear and a decade of hateful and conspiratorial rhetoric, entered peasant households and took everything edible: potatoes, beets, squash, beans, peas, anything in the oven and anything in the cupboard, farm animals and pets.
The result was a catastrophe: At least 5 million people perished of hunger between 1931 and 1934 all across the Soviet Union. Among them were more than 3.9 million Ukrainians. In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–3 was described in émigré publications at the time and later as the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger—holod—and extermination—mor.
But famine was only half the story. While peasants were dying in the countryside, the Soviet secret police simultaneously launched an attack on the Ukrainian intellectual and political elites. As the famine spread, a campaign of slander and repression was launched against Ukrainian intellectuals, professors, museum curators, writers, artists, priests, theologians, public officials and bureaucrats.
Anyone connected to the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic, which had existed for a few months from June 1917, anyone who had promoted the Ukrainian language or Ukrainian history, anyone with an independent literary or artistic career, was liable to be publicly vilified, jailed, sent to a labour camp or executed.”
The manipulation of the body is the most direct path to manipulation of the brain. Once a population’s bodies are under threat, their brains become far more malleable. The price for this dual body-mind control, however, is mass death.
Back in the USSR
America is a long way from Ukraine in Stalin’s Soviet Union; there are not yet reports of ICE agents raiding people’s kitchens and backyard gardens. But when a regime goes this far out of its way to make sure people can’t eat, and then repeatedly lies about the reason, it’s hard not to see that this is the direction we’re being steered.
The message from Trump and his sycophants could not be any clearer: if you do not obey, you will not eat. If you go hungry, you are not worthy.
This is the amoral logic of every authoritarian famine in history from Ireland to Bengal to Ukraine. And it is now being tested in America.
Once you cross the line of starving your own people, you cannot take it back.
The American exceptionalism so many have relied on has had its polarity reversed. The current U.S. government is indeed exceptional, insofar as it is combining the worst policies ever devised as its domestic and foreign policy toolkit: destabilization, violence, and now starvation.
“Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.” —Amartya Sen
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