As a candidate, Donald Trump frequently promised to “fix” poverty. As president, he has continued to make a big show of concern for poor Americans. “We want to lift every American family out of poverty and into a future of hope and opportunity,” he said recently.

For the past few months, Trump has bragged—with a mixture of fact and fiction—about his great, amazing, incredible strides in accomplishing that goal. The “poverty index” is the “best number EVER,” he tweeted in June. (Not true.) “One million people have been lifted out of poverty and the poverty rate for African Americans has reached the lowest level ever recorded,” he said at a rally in May. (Both true.) “Nearly five million Americans have been lifted off food stamps,” he said in February. (Not true.)

Now, apparently, Trump believes his work on fighting poverty is complete. How else to explain his administration’s plan to tighten eligibility requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)? After all, the consequences of such a move are widely accepted: Roughly three million Americans would lose food stamps, while potentially hundreds of thousands of low-income students would lose their free school lunches. In short, Trump’s proposed rule changes would accomplish exactly the opposite of lifting families out of poverty; it would hold these families’ heads under water.

This is just the latest salvo in a decades-long, bipartisan effort to shred the social safety net. There remains an unyielding and erroneous assumption that people are poor by choice; in one 1985 survey, repeated in 2016, the percent of respondents saying “welfare benefits make people dependent and encourage them to stay poor” barely budged, going from 59 percent to 54 percent. This, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of poor people aren’t able-bodied adults electing not to work, but children, elderly, disabled, or full-time students or caregivers.

Every administration since Ronald Reagan’s, with the exception of Barack Obama’s, has made moves to reduce either the amount, type, or length of government support for people in poverty. Austerity is often used as an excuse, even when the proposed cuts are—as in today’s case—preceded by a major tax cut for the rich. Though more commonly a passion project of the Republican Party, the Democrats don’t have a sterling record: Perhaps no other legislation did more damage to the safety net than Bill Clinton’s “welfare reform.” Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer, the authors of $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, have shown that the number of Americans living on $2 a day or less has doubled since 1996, to more than 1.5 million.