ESSAY: Let them eat Ozempic
America gets its first trillionaire as people starve, while Trump hawks meds to suppress appetite. And as affordability becomes the new bipartisan goal, does that secretly play into oligarchs' hands?
This week, Elon Musk won a pay package that puts him on track to be the world’s first trillionaire, and the only reason that may not happen is someone else becoming one first. It was the same week that The New York Times sent a team to West Virginia to ask after the effects of Musk’s ex President Trump’s food-stamp cuts. It featured the story of a woman who would normally have $780 deposited into her account on the first of the month. What she had in her bank account this month was — 12 cents.
For what it’s worth, Trump has framed himself as a nationalist who puts America First. But one of the things The Times’s team found, surely concerning to a bona fide nationalist, is that some in West Virginia are having to forgo all-American meals to eat foreign foods like ramen: “With the SNAP benefits,” one local told the newspaper, “we going to have a good Southern meal, like fried chicken, and green beans, mashed potatoes, all the good stuff, rolls, all that. But without, it’s more like hot dogs, and ramen noodles, and stuff like that. And that’s just not healthy. It’s really not.”
America First: Where a South African immigrant who lives off government contracts can become a trillionaire, and West Virginia natives can’t even follow their folkways.
I couldn’t shake from my mind this week the juxtaposition of the world’s first trillionaire and the woman with 12 cents in her bank account. And it was strangely fitting that, as the specter of hunger began to descend on tens of millions, the president this week made a splash of promoting medicines that make you less hungry.
It was Trump at his most…everything. He sat in the Oval, slur-reading from a script. He droned about his new plan to lower the cost of Ozempic and other anti-obesity drugs. He looked around the room and asked some of the officials around him if they were on the drugs, simply told people that some were not on it but this guy over here was definitely on it, etc. It was Trumpian in its grasp of how to make a moment — a simple initiative that people will feel in their lives, remember, give him credit for. It was Trumpian in its stand-up-comedian grasp of attention and being entertaining and always making people look. And it was Trumpian, above all, in addressing a problem that is real while also making it worse. When histories are written of this moment in time, I imagine they will have a lot to say about cutting food benefits for 42 million people while lowering the cost of medications that make you less compelled to eat.
These juxtapositions are American life now. Flights are being cut left and right because of the government shutdown, but the abduction and rendition of immigrants continue apace. It is a country where your flights to see loved ones are being canceled, but their flights to take people disappeared by masked cowards to foreign prisons somehow manage to get funded. These days, having a foreign accent in public is more likely to get you on an airplane than buying a ticket with good ol’ U.S. dollars.
It is no accident that in a country and a time like this, in the city where more Americans live than anyplace else, New York elected an unapologetic immigrant, democratic socialist, and Muslim as mayor. Zohran Mamdani is a proud immigrant at a time when the Trump regime is trying to shrink the circle of American belonging. He is a democratic socialist at a time when wealth inequality — let’s just call it oligarchy — is at such extremes as to threaten the republic itself. He is a Muslim who came of age as people like him were being smeared as terrorists, and who now faces a president whose administration is seeking to brand much of the left as terrorists.
He won because of a relentless focus on an issue, affordability, that is the holy grail for progressives — connected to every structural injustice but easily relatable. You didn’t need a dissertation for this idea; you don’t need to memorize any new terms. The idea of being able to afford life has become a compelling thread for Democrats, because affording gets you to corporate power, it gets you to unions, it gets you to tax policy, it gets you to food deserts, it gets you to transit, it gets you to climate, it gets you to housing, it gets you to childcare, it gets you to entrepreneurship. But it doesn’t read, I think, like you’re an academic who wants to transform the society in some abstract, far-off ways, or like you’re a street hawker with a trench coat full of arcane programs to sell; it reads like you’re a helper who wants to make life easier yesterday, and by the way you have programs. It is an anti-inflammatory way into an agenda of care, broadly defined, that in the past has sadly repelled many whom it would help.
The ability to afford your life is such a powerful frame, in fact, that Trump is jealous of Mamdani — probably also because Mamdani’s wife actually seems to love him — and Trump wants people to think that he is the real fighter for affordability. After all, his focus on it in 2024 propelled his victory.
But there is a part of me that steps back from the emerging bipartisan consensus on people being able to afford basic necessities and asks: As good a politics as this may be, as much as this approach meets people where they are, is there not something dispiriting about it, too? Are we failing to notice a cultural shift behind the emerging consensus — that in a country so in the grips of the oligarchs, being able to afford to eat and look up at a roof is becoming the ceiling, not the floor, of human possibility?
Mamdani grasped the point when, alongside the slogans about a city people can afford, he included the idea of affording to dream. Because, it seems to me, affording should be hygiene. It should be basic. It should be table stakes. Affording should be a human right. But I wouldn’t want to live in a society in which both right and left have so internalized the inevitability of capture by a trillionaire oligarchy that the highest dream is being able to renew your lease and buy more groceries for another month. It is almost as if, somewhere down the line, we stopped being a country that talked about all the amazing things human beings can dare, do, build, create, launch, invent, and satisfied ourselves with the idea that being able to survive is gift enough.
Survival should be a nonnegotiable. It should not cosplay as a political imagination.
In a nation on track to see its first trillionaire, with more to follow, let the restoration of food stamps — and, meanwhile, medicines to make you forget your hunger — not be the summit of collective vision. Affording is only the first step. Then you dream.
42 million people who may go to bed hungry is simply not acceptable for the richest country in the world. We can solve this in two ways:
1) rather dramatically, raise the pay scale of those at the bottom of the income distribution. Two problems with this one. First, dreaded inflation will creep up. Secondly, as workers cost more, business owners will be more likely to automate, substituting machines for people.
2) change the income tax distribution to place a far larger burden on the super Rich, while concurrently lowering the rates for anyone outside the top 10% of income.
Affordability is not the problem. The problem is the way that we, as a society, elect to distribute the rewards of our work. It’s simple and it needs to change.
In the richest country in the world….. everyone should be thriving