I notice that, while keeping up with Fox and Friends, wondering what his personal bagman has on tape that the FBI has now, and trying to depress James Comey’s book sales, the president* has managed to find time to make the lives of poor—one might even say economically anxious—Americans even more miserable than they already are. From The Hill:

Trump is doing so through a sweeping executive order that was quietly issued earlier this week—and that largely flew under the radar. It calls on the Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture and other agencies across the federal government to craft new rules requiring that beneficiaries of a host of programs work or lose their benefits. Trump argued with the order, which has been in the works since last year, that the programs have grown too large while failing to move needy people out of government help.

"Since its inception, the welfare system has grown into a large bureaucracy that might be susceptible to measuring success by how many people are enrolled in a program rather than by how many have moved from poverty into financial independence," it states. The order is directed at "any program that provides means-tested assistance or other assistance that provides benefits to people, households or families that have low incomes."

This isn’t Trump, I don’t believe, although he’s bully enough to sign it with gusto. This is pure Mike Pence. This is pure Paul Ryan. In other words, this is pure modern Republicanism—Reaganism straight, no chaser.

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) late last year said he wanted Republicans to work on entitlement reform, with a focus on promoting work and career-based education. "We want to smooth the path from welfare to work, pull people out of poverty, pull people out of welfare," Ryan said in December.

Allegedly serious people have spent the past couple of weeks wondering why Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, didn’t do more to push back against a clearly unbalanced president before chickening out on his 2018 re-election campaign. This is why. Paul Ryan has dedicated his political life to the division of society into makers, who own the country, and takers, who should be left to die in the streets. He believes it as deeply as he believes anything. Paul Ryan would have been fine if Vlad the Impaler had been elected in 2016 as long as President Impaler did things like this.

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One of the real tricks of the trade here is to fashion every federal aid program into “welfare,” even though Bill Clinton ended the federal role in welfare over 20 years ago. But, now, food stamps are “welfare.” Medicaid is “welfare.” (They’ve repeatedly tried to brand both Social Security and Medicaid as “welfare,” too. So far, they’ve failed at that. Ryan sheds salty tears over this every time he gets behind a microphone.) If you rebrand a program as “welfare” in the public mind, you can do pretty much anything you want to the people who depend on it.

The order follows policy shifts already underway at various agencies. Health and Human Services officials have encouraged states to pursue work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries. Arkansas, Indiana and Kentucky have already been granted such waivers, and several other states have waivers pending with the administration. Earlier this year, the Agriculture Department sought input on "innovative ideas to promote work and self-sufficiency among able-bodied adults" participating in the food stamp program. In Congress, House Republicans unveiled a provision in the 2018 farm bill to expand mandatory work requirements in the food stamp program. The broader legislation will be marked up later this month, but it faces a long uphill battle.

If they maintain control of the Congress this fall, the Republicans will push even harder on these things and the president* will sign anything they put in front of him, because Trumpism is Republicanism without an inside voice, and Republicanism has been Trumpism in embryo ever since the last time we elected an entertainer to be president.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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