Trump's 'Food Box Bonanza' Was Just a Grift Wrapped in Rotting Kale

You ever watch a bunch of tourists in brand-new gear try to start a campfire in the damp Oregon woods? It’s a pathetic, smoky mess that ends with them calling for help. That’s the USDA’s “Farmers to Families Food Box” program in a nutshell: a bunch of D.C. suits who think food comes from a magical chute behind the Whole Foods cheese counter decided they’d “solve” hunger. The result was a goddamn mudslide of incompetence that cost taxpayers billions and mostly just produced truckloads of sentient, fuzzy potatoes.

The plan, scribbled on a cocktail napkin at some swamp-adjacent country club, was to buy surplus food from farmers and give it to the poor. A noble idea, if the people running it had a single functioning brain cell among them. Instead, they handed out massive, no-bid contracts to their buddies. The crown jewel of this shitshow was a $39 million contract awarded to a Texas wedding planner. You read that right. A company whose only logistical experience was figuring out where to put the fucking ice sculpture got a contract to feed millions of desperate Americans. Their big idea was reportedly to source artisanal cheese from a guy they knew and deliver it in a fleet of tastefully decorated golf carts. It went about as well as you’d expect.

Naturally, because this is the Trump administration, the grift had to have a thick, tacky layer of branding. The First Daughter of Useless Initiatives, Ivanka, paraded around farms in miraculously clean designer boots, posing for photos and pretending to understand crop rotation. Meanwhile, her father demanded that every box of liquefying lettuce include a signed letter from him. Rumor has it the first draft was scrawled in Sharpie on the back of a McDonald’s placemat and mostly contained grievances about windmills and water pressure. It was less a letter to the hungry and more a hostage note from a failing narcissist.

This isn’t just one bad program. It’s the entire philosophy of the modern GOP laid bare. For them, government isn’t a public trust; it’s a gold rush. Every crisis is an opportunity to funnel public money to whichever donor or unqualified moron happens to be in their contacts list. These are people who would try to log an old-growth forest with a butter knife and then blame the trees for being too sturdy. They look at a national crisis and see a branding opportunity, a chance to slap their name on a box of moldy onions and call it patriotism.

So now, a congressional committee is “investigating.” Big deal. They’ll uncover what we already know: the whole thing was a colossal, rotten failure designed to enrich the connected and stroke the ego of a clown-show president. The stench of it all hangs in the air, thicker than wildfire smoke in August. It was never about feeding families. It was about feeding the beast. And the beast is always hungry.