Most MAGAts Don't Eat Actual Food; They Eat Spam
Did you see Chris Evans’ tweet yesterday about the farmer who voted for Trump— and still supports Trump— saying there will be no food within two days if ICE rounds up immigrants. The farmer doesn’t believe Trump will “follow through on his policies.” That was right around the same time Josh Gerstein and Dasha Burns reported that “Acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove called for a major redeployment of Justice Department resources to immigration enforcement, including redirecting anti-terrorism squads. In some of the first known actions of President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, the acting deputy AG directed the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces ‘to assist in the execution of President Trump’s immigration-related initiatives.’”
So maybe the farmer is wrong and Trump very much will “follow through on his policies.” Maybe it’s just going to be bad for people who eat fresh food, not folks who eat processed “food.” The majority of Americans consume a diet dominated by processed or ultra-processed foods— foods that are industrially made and have little resemblance to their original ingredients— while a much smaller percentage prioritizes fresh, whole foods as their mainstay. About 2/3s of calories consumed by Americans come from processed food (junk food). Just a small percentage of Americans rely predominantly on fresh, whole foods. This is often tied to higher income levels or an intentional focus on health-conscious eating. For example, according to the Produce for Better Health Foundation, only 10% of Americans meet the daily recommended intake of fruits and vegetables, which implies that fresh food consumption is pretty low for many of us, especially lower-income households which have less access to fresh foods (due to cost or food deserts) and are more reliant on affordable, processed options. Ironically, people in rural areas are the least likely to eat real food— the most likely not to support Trump but to also eat garbage instead of food. (Those two things are definitely related.)
So, that farmer’s warning… Trump knows it won’t matter to “his” people. They eat manufactured stuff that lasts on shelves for years. Yesterday, though, Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling reported that Trump’s immigration plans are already wrecking the food industry with prices likely to start rising. They wrote that Bakersfield “saw a massive drop-off in the number of field workers showing up for work Tuesday while ICE agents in unmarked Chevy Suburbans rounded up and detained immigrants in the area, profiling individuals they believed to be field workers… The end result: acres of unpicked oranges roasting in the California sun at the height of the season. Bakersfield makes up a small portion of California’s Central Valley, which produces approximately a quarter of the nation’s food. Kern County, where Bakersfield is located, has ranked within the top three agricultural counties in the nation for the last several years, largely off the backs of undocumented laborers, who are estimated to comprise more than half of the county’s workforce.”
“We’re in the middle of our citrus harvesting,” Casey Creamer, president of the industry group California Citrus Mutual, told CalMatters. “This sent shockwaves through the entire community. People aren’t going to work and kids aren’t going to school. Yesterday about 25 percent of the workforce, today 75 percent didn’t show up.”
Losing the bulk of America’s agricultural workforce overnight is a recipe for “absolute economic devastation,” according to Richard S. Gearhart, an associate professor of economics at Cal State-Bakersfield, who spoke with the nonprofit news outlet.
“You are talking about a recession-level event if this is the new long-term norm,” Gearhart said, arguing that the end result of Trump’s policies will be felt in the grocery store checkout lines across America.
The forty-seventh president has effectively promised a full-throttle immigration crackdown for the next four years that includes attacking birthright citizenship and ordering high-profile ICE raids around the country against undocumented immigrants.
But just two days into the administration, it appears that anti-immigration efforts will be a relative free-for-all. On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would roll back an Obama-era directive, suddenly allowing the immigration agency to detain people in sensitive areas such as hospitals, places of worship, courtrooms, funerals, and weddings.
“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” a spokesperson for the agency said in a statement. “The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense.”
If only 10% of Americans— and mostly in blue states, by the way— eat fresh fruits and vegetables, it won’t matter to MAGAts anyway. Really it comes down to Trump’s crackdown on immigration not just exposing the deep economic reliance on undocumented workers— it also exposes a moral vacuum at the heart of the MAGAt ethos. This isn’t about security or sovereignty; it’s about scapegoating. And the irony is almost unbearable: the very people cheering on these policies are the ones who will suffer the most when their shelves, once stocked with cheap processed foods, start reflecting the scarcity created by a decimated agricultural workforce. It’s not hypothetical anymore when oranges are rotting in Bakersfield and laborers are disappearing from the fields. And yet, those hit hardest may never connect the dots between their leader’s policies and their own suffering, because they’ve been conditioned to see immigrants as the cause of their problems, not the solution.
Meanwhile, Trump’s promise of unchecked raids in places like schools, hospitals and churches signals something far more dangerous than economic fallout: it’s the normalization of cruelty as policy. The dismantling of protections in sensitive locations sends a clear message— no one is safe, particularly not society’s most vulnerable. This isn’t about fixing a broken immigration system; it’s about inflicting pain to score political points with his moron base. In the end, this isn’t just about food or jobs; it’s about the soul of the nation. It’s what Bishop Budde was talking about causing Trump to melt down. His immigration agenda underscores a chilling truth: the MAGA vision for America isn’t one of prosperity, but of fear and division. And as the oranges rot in California’s sun and grocery prices climb, it’s worth asking— how long will Americans keep swallowing the manufactured lies before they realize the cost of this cruelty is far too high?