Donald Trump: ‘Let the Hunger Games Begin’

America Has Entered the Second Gilded Age Where the Rich Rob the Poor

Credit: John Cole, 'The Scranton Times-Tribune', PA

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EYE OF THE NEEDLE: One of America’s hard-learned truisms is: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Since the first Gilded Age, saloons across the land provided free pickled eggs, peanuts, and pig knuckles on their bar counters — not out of the goodness of their hearts, but to increase thirst. It worked.

Now that we have entered America’s second Gilded Age — where the rich rob the poor — it’s high time we bumped it up a notch. To that end, the Reverend Mario Murillo — a charismatic anti-woke, anti-LGBTQ, anti-$8-a-gallon-of-gas, fire-and-brimstone Bible beater — is coming to town this Saturday, offering those who attend “a free brunch.”

Brunch?

If nothing else, it’s a novel appeal Murillo will be meeting this Saturday at the Veronica Springs Church and is hoping his “free brunch” offer — empanadas and mimosas? — will entice his target audience of “business leaders, law enforcement, educators, and government officials” to attend.

By all means go. But let me be plain: “There ain’t no such thing as a free brunch.” And what Murillo is peddling is a whole lot more toxic than any barstool hooch or bathtub gin.

The brunch offer suggests that Murillo might have read recent media accounts that in Santa Barbara, even households making $100,000 now qualify as “low-income.” The real number is $90,000. What that number qualifies you for is a spot on the Housing Authority waiting list. But it won’t get you actual housing. Why? There are so many people in this county making so much less, the waiting list will always go on forever.

It’s important to be clear about this, because in Santa Barbara County, a family of four people lives in poverty if they make $41,000. Do not minimize what poverty looks like in this county.

I say that because 13 million Americans are expected to lose their health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office, if the cuts outlined in the Big, Beautiful Bill (BBB) now being hawked by our Huckster in Chief are passed. Based on the rhetoric of Murrillo’s press release, the good reverend might take to the pulpit wearing a “Make America Poor Again” red hat.

Trump and his toadies in Congress are proposing $1.5 trillion in Medicaid and Food Stamp cuts in order to give even bigger tax breaks — $1.1 trillion — to the wealthy and very wealthy. Of this, two-thirds of the new tax breaks will be enjoyed by those households making $500,000 a year. And one-quarter of the tax benefits will go to people making $1 million a year or more.

Right now, we have 52,000 people in Santa Barbara County staying alive only with the help of food stamps. Thanks to research generously provided by Independent intern Ella Heydenfeldt, we learned that to qualify for this program, a single person can make no more than $29,160 a year.

Not only will the BBB end subsidies for Obamacare, but it will use red tape to strangle Medicaid — the health insurance safety net for low-income Americans, which includes many old people. We know 143,590 county residents are now enrolled. That’s 32.1 percent of our population.

Perhaps the good reverend should know Santa Barbara — with a poverty rate of 16.9 percent — qualifies as the second poorest county in the state. Perhaps he can lead us in a chant of “We’re Number Two!” (Statewide and nationally, the average is 12 percent. For our kids, it’s 21.3 percent.)

I understand some people interpret the Bible to say homosexuality — and the taste for “strange flesh” — is “an abomination in the eyes of the Lord.” I’m guessing Reverend Murillo might be one of them.

One of the wonderful things about the Bible is that it says pretty much everything and its opposite, too. Last night, I dusted off my Book of Ezekiel and went looking for what happened to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which God famously wiped off the face of the map after winning a bet with Abraham that he couldn’t find 10 righteous people living in both cities combined. For most of my life, I understood the sin of Sodom to be that men lay with men; hell, they named anal sex after it.

Ezekiel has a different spin. “Now this is the sin of Sodom,” he explained. “She and her sisters were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned. They did not help the poor and the needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me.” Foreigners were raped and plundered. A woman who gave bread to the hungry was burned alive. As was another woman who gave water to the thirsty.

In other words, people were pushing the very young, the very old, the destitute, and the sick off the cliffs of economic despair. People who attack the foreigner. I mean, it’s right there in black and white.

That’s what’s happening right now in Washington, D.C. According to Ezekiel, Donald Trump is the true sodomite. Should his policies go forward, Jesus will have to come back now and produce a whole lot of loaves and fishes to feed the poor in Santa Barbara County, which already has the third highest rate of hungry people in California.

Reverend Murillo is right; we’re living in Old Testament times. He just happens to be on the wrong side.

And for what? Thirty pieces of silver. We all know what the Bible says about that.

The Veronica Springs church is located near the old, dried Veronica Springs, which for about 30 years they strip-mined, bottled — as many as 500,000 a year — and sold for its medicinal values. The water was yellow and mephitic and packed what they called “a strong, purgative” punch, rousing paralyzed bowels back into the digestive fray.

One can only pray they serve bottles of the stuff at the good reverend’s free brunch. You’ll need it.