Jeffries visits Brooklyn pantry as SNAP lapse hits home
At a Brooklyn food pantry, the House Democratic leader met families missing their SNAP benefits and blasted Republicans for skipping town as the shutdown threatens millions of Americans’ food aid.
FIRST THINGS FIRST
BROOKLYN — The orange-apron-clad staffers were the first thing I noticed on Saturday afternoon when I walked into The Campaign Against Hunger’s “SuperPantry,” one of the largest emergency food pantries in New York City. They were calm, well-trained, and impossibly patient as they helped neighbors load carts with produce, grains and proteins.
In between those quiet acts of service, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) listened as constituents shared how the shutdown’s SNAP funding lapse threatened to upend their lives, paused for selfies and hugs, and demanded he keep fighting in Washington even as hardship deepened at home.
The scene was a departure from the one more than 1,000 miles south, where President Donald Trump was finishing up a round of golf at his South Beach course. Just hours before, he hosted a party at Mar-a-Lago where guests dressed up in flapper costumes and sat at well-decked-out tables while a band played, according to reporters traveling with him. The theme was “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody.”
When he did speak about SNAP, as he did upon arriving in Florida on Friday afternoon, he made unsupported claims about program recipients.
“Largely, when you talk about SNAP, you’re talking about largely Democrats, but I’m president, I want to help everybody—I want to help Democrats and the Republicans,” Trump told reporters. “But when you’re talking about SNAP, if you look, it’s largely Democrats, they’re hurting their own people.” (There is no clear publicly available breakdown of SNAP recipients by party affiliation of the recipients. But county‐level data suggests that many places where SNAP usage is increasing are in Republican-leaning counties, which cuts against Trump’s suggestion.)
And before boarding Air Force One to return to Washington on Sunday night, President Trump made a quick stop to visit the president’s private aircraft known in MAGA world as “Trump Force One,” which White House Communications Director Steven Cheung described as “one of the most recognizable aircraft in history which played such an important role in the President’s historic victories.”
The split-screen raised questions about whether Republican leaders were disconnected from the realities of their constituents beyond politics.
Jeffries told me he spoke with several constituents at the food pantry—working families who depend on SNAP to help cover their groceries—and that each told him their benefits had been reduced or disappeared entirely when they checked their accounts that morning.
“That’s a decision that the Trump administration has made, and that impacts people here in Brooklyn and all across the country—including in districts represented by Republicans,” he added. “And so this is not a partisan issue for us. Making sure that every single person in this country can put food on the table is an American issue.”