When Donald Trump became president, he repeatedly tried to raise the rent. at least 4 million Many of the poorest people in this country are elderly or disabled. Proposes cutting federal disability benefits a quarter million low-income childrenon the grounds that someone else in the family was already receiving help. He tried to impose a requirement that poor parents cooperate. child support applicationincluding having single mothers revealing their sexual historyBefore they and their children could receive food aid.

he tried make a rule It allows employers to pocket workers’ tips. And he did make a rule Millions of low-wage workers are denied overtime pay if they earn more than $35,568 a year.

Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance are running a campaign that prioritizes the working class, promising to protect ordinary Americans from an influx of workers. immigrant laborreturn manufacturing jobs to the United States to support rural areas and families with children and generally leaving it to the elites.

Critics respond by quoting Project 2025, a potential plan for a second Trump presidency that proposes deep cuts to the social safety net for low-income families. bigger tax cuts for the rich. But Trump still their clear ties to their authors, He said Project 2025 did not represent him.

Yet his views on the working class and poor people can be found in the specific actions he sought to take when he had the authority to make public policy as president.

ProPublica examined Trump’s proposed budgets from 2018 through 2021, as well as regulations he sought to enact or revise through cabinet agencies, including the Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services departments, as well as quasi-independent agencies. National Labor Relations Board and Social Security Administration.

While in the White House, we have seen Trump advance an agenda across his administration designed to cut health care, food and housing programs, and workforce protections for poor and working-class Americans.

“Trump has proposed far deeper cuts to programs for low- and middle-income people than any other president has by far, including Reagan,” said Robert Greenstein, a longtime expert on federal poverty policy. An article for the Brookings Institution About Trump’s first-term budgets.

Trump was largely hindered in achieving many of these goals because he was inefficient in pursuing them until the second half of his term. According to journalists who followed him at that time not ready to win the presidency Stop filling key positions and developing a legal and regulatory strategy to address poverty issues in 2016.

He maintained control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate during his first two years in office, but his only chance budget reconciliation (annual budget drafts that cannot be refuted by the other party) to reduce taxes for the rich and trying to repeal Obamacare. By 2019, there was not much time left for cabinet institutions to develop new regulations and go through the long process. federal rulemaking process and deal with any legal challenges.

Trump and his allies to look focused That he won’t repeat such mistakes if he wins the White House again. Republican leaders in Congress I said This time, if they regain a majority in both chambers, they will use compromise bills to combine renewed tax cuts with aggressive cuts in social spending. Meanwhile, Trump will likely push new regulations early in his term, in part to ensure that legal challenges to those regulations have a chance to be heard before a trial. Supreme Court with the solid conservative majority it created.

If he trusts the early recommendations, this means:

• Cutting the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP billions of dollars.
• being canceled nearly one million children Eligibility for free school lunch.
• Freezing Pell grants for low-income college students, so they are not adjusted for inflation.
• Overhauling and significantly cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, popularly known as food stamps, in part by identifying individuals whose assets are exceeded $2,250 not being poor enough to receive assistance and reducing the monthly food stamp minimum from $23 to zero.
• eliminate Numerous programs designed to increase the supply and investment in affordable housing in low-income communities.
• Elimination of a program that helps poor families heat their homes Be prepared for power outages and other energy crises.
• shrinking Partnership and cutting nearly in half funding for job training programs that help people get off government assistance.
• Restraint collective bargaining rights Unions where workers fight for better wages and working conditions.

Trump also never wavered from his goal of repealing the Affordable Care Act, which disproportionately serves low-income Americans. Cut in half the open enrollment windows through which people can sign up for health insurance under the ACA, and over 80% Funding efforts to help low-income people and others navigate the system. This has particularly affected people with special needs or limited access to or comfort with the internet.

As a result of these and other changes, number of uninsured people It increased in 2017 for the first time since the law came into effect in the United States, then increased again in 2018 and 2019. As of that year, 2.3 million fewer Americans had health insurance than when Trump came to power, and 700,000 fewer of them were children.

President Joe Biden reversed many of those changes. But Trump could reverse them, especially if he has a majority in Congress.

Perhaps the most important thing Trump has done with administrative authority What he does in his first term — which he clearly wants to do more of — is to reduce the civil service, meaning non-political federal employees he collectively calls the “Deep State.”

This would have a disproportionately negative impact on programs that serve poor and working Americans. disability and health insurance, such as the Social Security Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. survivor benefits Organizations that provide housing assistance and housing assistance to low-income families in times of need rely heavily on mid-level staff and local offices in Washington, D.C., to process claims and get help to people.

Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not respond to ProPublica’s detailed list of questions about whether Trump wanted to distance himself from his first-term record on issues affecting the working class or whether his second-term agenda would be different.

Instead, he focused on Social Security and Medicare, saying Trump protected those programs in his first term and I would do it again. “President Trump will rapidly rebuild the greatest economy in history by unleashing American energy, cutting job-killing regulations, and embracing pro-growth America First tax and trade policies,” Leavitt said.

one new seemingly The pro-worker policy proposed by Trump and his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris: repealing tip taxes.

Trump officials and Republican politicians have long said that more federal spending on safety-net programs is not the solution to poverty and that poor people should be less reliant on government handouts and take more personal responsibility.

And working-class voters, especially white men without college degrees who feel their financial situation is poor. decreased compared to other demographic groups – a growing number of them have joined the Trump movement. Moreover, some counties that have seen large increases in food stamp use in recent years keep voting for himdespite efforts to scale back this program and others that people in these places rely on. (All that being said, Trump supporters like that better off On average, frequently from the media portrays them that way.)

Meanwhile, including pandemic aid stimulus checksIt started during the Trump administration and helped reduce poverty rates. However, these efforts were temporary responses to the crisis and were mostly Democrats in Congress; these were hardly part of Trump’s administration agenda.

Amid a presidential race focused on sometimes forgotten, high-poverty communities — Vance is repeatedly touting his own proposal Appalachian-adjacent Greenstein, the poverty policy expert, said it’s surprising that journalists haven’t examined Trump’s first-term budgets and his proposals on those issues more.

Will Trump continue his Biden administration for a second term? efforts To make sure the IRS doesn’t Disproportionate auditing of poor people’s taxes? Will he defend Biden’s rights? welfare reformsDoes it aim to ensure that states actually use welfare money to help low-income families?

Trump hasn’t faced many of these questions on the campaign trail, in debates or in interviews because the candidates and the reporters covering them tend to focus more on the middle class.