Our Republican-controlled Congress is a little busy right now and we don't know when, or if, they'll get around to gutting the social safety net so Trump will begin the process himself.
Politico reports that Trump will sign an executive order directing various federal agencies to make it as difficult as possible for people to enroll in assistance programs under current law.
The White House is quietly preparing a sweeping executive order that would mandate a top-to-bottom review of the federal programs on which millions of poor Americans rely. [...]
In the meantime, the Trump administration has already begun making policy shifts that could have major ramifications.
Federal health officials are encouraging states to impose work requirements on able-bodied adults on Medicaid — a major philosophical shift that would treat the program as welfare, rather than health insurance.
In addition to making it more difficult to enroll in Medicaid, the Trump regime is also going to allow states to implement strict work requirements and drug testing for food stamp recipients and applicants that will inevitably cut the number of people receiving assistance.
Some states attempted to implement these requirements under the Obama administration, but they were denied. Those states, which also happen to be states that Trump won in 2016, will be the first to implement the requirements.
The photo at the top of this post, which shows Trump as one of the aliens from They Live, is actually from Mexico but it's one of my favorite photos because it's a fitting analogy for Trump's America. The overwhelming majority of people who benefit from social assistance programs are white, particularly white people concentrated in poor and working class neighborhoods and conservative states that supported Trump. They think Trump is one of them, but he isn't. He isn't going to "make America great again" so much as he is going to destroy it. I'm sure Trump isn't really an alien or a lizard, but he may as well be.
It's true that a significant number of white people voted for Trump because of racial animosity, not "economic anxiety," but he's going to make their lives worse regardless of why they voted for him.
The Trump regime is assembling all the building blocks of a recession. They're going to pass a tax bill that raises taxes on the working class and makes health insurance more expensive. They're going to block access to assistance programs, like food stamps, which are directly stimulative to the economy. Trump is probably going to withdraw from NAFTA, raising prices on virtually everything. The regime isn't responding to natural disasters in a timely or appropriate manner. They're deregulating banks again and the Consumer Protection Bureau has been effectively frozen. And Speaker Paul Ryan still wants to privatize Medicare and cut Medicaid by a trillion dollars.
I don't think Republicans realize that failing to achieve all those goals is the only thing that keeps them alive.