“We need to encourage people by giving them a helping hand, but not allowing it to become an indefinitely giving hand,” Sonny Perdue, the agriculture secretary, said in a news release. “Now, in the midst of the strongest economy in a generation, we need everyone who can work, to work.” The change is projected to end SNAP benefits for nearly 700,000 adults, saving $5 billion over five years — or less than a third of the $19 billion the government has spent so far on farmers affected by the trade war.

It’s not too hard to imagine a Trump who pursued this strategy much more aggressively, doling out checks and assistance to his core constituencies at every opportunity. One of his early advisers, Steve Bannon, urged as much at the start of Trump's administration, calling for an “economic nationalism” to match the president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. It’s an approach that may have left him more popular than he is now, or at least, less unpopular.

That gets to one takeaway from the Trump years: that there’s a real constituency for the white welfare state he gestured at during his campaign. It’s not a majority, but our election rules (starting with the Electoral College) and the structure of our government (like equal representation of states in the Senate) make it large enough to claim and maintain real political power. And the Trump phenomenon also shows that you don’t have to deliver the benefits to hold those voters in your camp. All you have to do is deliver pain to disfavored groups, to target them and make a show of it.

Donald Trump has been too erratic and undisciplined to take welfare chauvinism as far as it could probably go. But it is almost certainly true that somewhere in American politics, there’s someone who has paid attention to what Trump has discovered and is planning accordingly.