When I was a boy in Holly Springs, Mississippi, you could stand in front of the local Women, Infants and Children office, throw a rock and hit the office of the Mississippi State Highway Department, where my dad worked on road construction crews. My mother, a seventh-grade English teacher, would sometimes  bring me with her to the WIC office to pick up food items such as cheese and powdered milk on her way home from the school.

I don’t know how my mother felt pulling into WIC’s parking lot or pulling open its doors. She’s no longer here for me to ask. But I became angry on her behalf last week when Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma suggested she should have been ashamed.

Stitt’s state has one of the country’s highest poverty rates, one of the country’s highest child poverty rates and one of the highest rates of hunger and food insecurity. But he nevertheless supports the Trump administration’s cuts to food assistance programs. Those cuts have reduced the number of mothers and fathers who can discreetly purchase food in grocery stores using plastic cards connected to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In an interview with Stateline, Stitt, who also serves as the chairman of the National Governors Association, spoke longingly of the days when “there was a little stigma attached and you had to actually go to a food bank and pick up commodity cheese and commodity groceries, and it had a little stigma so you were a little bit embarrassed.”

He said, “Maybe we should go back to a little bit of that instead of just making it so easy.”

The last Republican president before Donald Trump, George W. Bush, tried — and mostly failed — to sell America on “compassionate conservatism,” but Stitt’s comments are consistent with a party that’s no longer even trying. In a 2018 interview, Bush explained, “I felt compelled to phrase it this way because people hear ‘conservative’ and they think heartless.”

There’s even more reason for that association now. Trump administration officials and Republicans who take their cues from the president appear to glory in the suffering of others. There is no shortage of conservatives who will cheer the brutality of ICE, applaud decisions that send asylum seekers back to deadly conditions in their homelands, shrug at the president denying disaster relief to Democratic-run states or treat people who have been relying on SNAP benefits as if they’re robbing the country blind.

At a June hearing of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Angie Craig of Wisconsin, the top Democrat on the committee, blasted Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins for “the largest cut to food assistance in the history of our country, at a time when more and more people are struggling to afford their food.”

At that point, about 3.5 million people had been cut from SNAP. The number has risen to 4.7 million (or 11% of participants) since. Craig made it clear to Rollins that she wasn’t buying the administration’s argument that SNAP is rife with fraud.

“I don’t think you understand the difference between an error rate and a fraud rate,” Craig said. “I honestly don’t. It is one of the lowest programs — the lowest fraud rate in any program in America is the SNAP program.”

An April 2025 report from the Congressional Research Service states it simply: “SNAP fraud is rare, according to available data and reports.”

But the Trump administration and Republicans in general continue to parrot the talking point: that food assistance programs are overrun with schemers and that people are going to great lengths to cheat the government out of $6.17 in food per day.

Rollins has talked about the smaller number of people receiving SNAP benefits as if that decrease is necessarily a positive development. She assumes that either the economy is better and fewer people need food stamps or there were people getting such help who should not have been getting it. She does not, will not, allow for the likelihood that many people who still need help are no longer receiving it.  

If Stitt had a heart for the people of Oklahoma, he wouldn’t want them jumping through hoops for food. He wouldn’t want them to feel embarrassed simply for asking for help. He would want them to be fed with their dignity intact.

But Republican ideology seems to have obscured not only his sense of decency but his appreciation for the facts. No matter how much SNAP is cut, he says, “Nobody’s going to go hungry in Oklahoma.” Before Trump even started cutting SNAP, Oklahoma had the fifth highest hunger rate in the nation.

But not to worry. Trump has canceled the USDA survey tdhat long measured how hungry Americans are.

I called my dad on Monday, and we talked about that fraught period when he and my mother were fully employed by the state of Mississippi, had a huge vegetable garden out back and still needed help from WIC. Stitt thinks my mother should have been embarrassed asking for food for me and my baby sister. I can only pray she wasn’t. Because the the only thing embarrassing is the richest country in the world being home to so many people with so little to eat.

The post The Republican governor who wants people to feel ashamed they can’t afford food appeared first on MS NOW.