On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced proposed rules that would cut more than three million people off food assistance. This latest plan confirms what many have long suspected: The only thing unifying its policies on poverty is cruelty. Prior right-wing assaults on the poor at least claimed some semblance of a coherent theme. In contrast, this proposal, and earlier ones, are a grab-bag of mutually inconsistent ideas seemingly selected only to maximize harm.

When President Ronald Reagan attacked anti-poverty programs, he claimed to be limiting assistance to the poorest of the poor. He insisted he was protecting a “safety net” for the “tru ly needy.” To do this, he denied aid to millions of working families. Under the rules he pushed through Congress, almost any wages were enough to disqualify a family from cash assistance and Medicaid within a few months. Working families had their food assistance cut and their paperwork requirements increased.

Of course, his concern for the extremely poor went only so far: The savings from these cuts paid for his massive tax cut for the rich, not for helping the poorest families afford food or housing.

A decade later, another Republican, Newt Gingrich, the speaker of the House, carried out even deeper cuts to anti-poverty programs, contending he was addressing a failure of recipients of public benefits to work. He lamented that only a small fraction of cash assistance recipients worked while they received aid. This was, of course, precisely the goal of the Reagan changes. Most welfare recipients did in fact seek and find work — but they were promptly thrown off the assistance rolls when they did.