A Word on the Trumps’ Financial Difficulties

My family depended on SNAP benefits for ten years, to keep from starving to death. We also lived for about six years on the Home Energy Assistance Program, getting a discount on our gas and electricity to keep from freezing to death. We now make just a hair too much income to qualify for those anymore, and I’m relieved. We badly needed those government programs, but they’re a pain to be on, not just because the paperwork required can easily become a full-time job.

While we were on SNAP and HEAP, I got a lot of remarks from the fine people of Steubenville telling me what they thought about people who needed a social safety net. The Steubenville highly conservative Catholics were the most vocal on the subject, but the good honest Appalachian townies gave me an earful too.  Thanks to them, I know exactly what to say in response to the bombshell news about President Trump’s income tax returns:

I have nothing against giving the poor a hand up. But I’m afraid that a second Trump term could encourage him to depend on wasteful government funds instead of encouraging him to find honest work and become a contributing member of society.

 It’s not that I’m not faithful to Catholic Social Teaching, you understand. I just believe people like the Trumps should be grateful for charitable donations from their churches instead of my tax dollars.  It makes me feel cheated, as a taxpayer, to line up at the grocery store for my cheap economical bone-in chickens I pay cash for, and watch the Trumps use government assistance for their overcooked steaks with ketchup.  If we give a handout to the Trumps, they’ll only spend it on drugs. I think it’s terrible that we’ve conditioned so many penthouse-dwelling trophy wives to think of one of their most basic parenting responsibilities is a job of the state. Of course I don’t want Barron to go hungry. But we should perform the work of mercy of teaching Melania Trump how to buy nutritious affordable food (low-sugar cereals and PBJ).

 (Yes, the line about low-sugar cereals comes from a local Catholic mom, and I kept the receipt.)

Our Lord granted me this house I live in because I have the courage to obey him, step out in faith, move to Steubenville, and never use birth control. If the Trumps had more faith they wouldn’t need to rely on a government handout. I’m pro-life and everything. But we ought to face that Donald Trump only had five children for the tax benefits, not for the good pious reasons I had mine.

Have the people of Manhattan considered how the value of their homes will go downhill now that everyone knows the Trumps are living on a tax return? No one wants to live in a community where the government foots the bill for food, housing and utilities for some while respectable people work hard for their money. You let one moocher in and there goes the neighborhood. Their culture of destruction will drag everything down. They’re going to have to gentrify or pass an ordinance banning rentals. It’s only good sense. It’ll keep drugs and prostitution away from our children. 

 Those people always seem to think they’re entitled to other people’s money. They need to learn the value of honest labor.

 There, I think I’ve got that just about right. That’s the loving Christian response, as loving Christians have told me for ten years.

 Or is it somehow different when the Trumps do it?