UPDATE (July 3, 2025, 2:49 9.m. ET): After a chaotic overnight session and a marathon morning floor speech from Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the House voted to pass the megabill on Thursday along party lines, 218-214.
When President Ronald Reagan was trying to justify massive cuts on social programs, he would often invoke the so-called welfare queen.
His rhetoric focused on an imaginary American — typically assumed to be a Black, single woman — who was living large on the public dole.
Today’s Republicans haven’t invoked the stereotype as they’ve set about slashing the safety net, but that may be because they don’t have to.
There’s a persistent myth in American politics that poverty has a single face and that face is usually Black, often female, and somehow responsible for her own hardship.
The Senate voted to pass the “big, beautiful bill” on Tuesday. The House, after wavering for a few hours on Wednesday night, will send it to President Donald Trump’s desk in time for his Fourth of July deadline. But even as Trump and his allies in Congress have prepared to take food off the tables of poor Americans with their megabill, the decades-long project to demonize social welfare programs has helped them avoid accountability.
And make no mistake, the people that many of these cuts are going to hurt the most are the white, rural voters who backed Trump in the last three elections.
There’s a persistent myth in American politics that poverty has a single face and that face is usually Black, often female, and somehow responsible for her own hardship.
That myth was not born by accident. It was crafted, polished and weaponized. It was built on decades of policy choices and political messaging that added racial overtones to programs designed to combat poverty among all Americans in an effort to erode public support.
Ironically, these programs began as ways to help poor white people. When the New Deal began tackling poverty, programs such as Aid to Dependent Children (later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children, AFDC) were designed to support mostly white, widowed mothers suffering in the Great Depression.
It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Movement gained traction in the 1960s that more Black families became able to access these same benefits. That led to a backlash against them that the right has long used to try to undercut them.
By the 1970s, amid rising inflation, economic anxiety and racial resentment, conservatives began to cast what was known as “welfare” not as a ladder out of poverty but as a trap and its recipients as ungrateful, unproductive burdens on the system.
Reagan took a story about a real woman convicted of fraud and exaggerated it into the fictional ‘welfare queen.’
That set the stage for Reagan, who took a story about a real woman convicted of fraud and exaggerated it into the fictional “welfare queen” who was supposedly cashing multiple checks under multiple names and driving a Cadillac.
The strategy worked. The “welfare queen” myth gave policymakers from both parties permission to strip benefits from millions of people.
When President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 welfare reform bill, officially ending AFDC and replacing it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the damage was codified. Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it,” and he did. But what also ended was any real commitment to a guaranteed safety net in this country.
The truth is, the majority of people living in poverty in America today are not Black. They are white, rural Americans, children and veterans. They are seniors on fixed incomes or single mothers juggling multiple jobs and still coming up short. The face of poverty is not who many Americans have been conditioned to see. The cost of that conditioning is showing up in real time. Last month, House Republicans advanced a tax bill that would give about $4 trillion in permanent tax breaks to the wealthy and big corporations over the next 10 years. And earlier this week, the Senate passed a revised version of that bill that would lock in those tax cuts that overwhelmingly help the rich. How do they plan to pay for it? By targeting the very programs that keep working people afloat — like SNAP and Medicaid. This isn’t fiscal responsibility. It’s cruelty disguised as economics. Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania joined us on “The Weeknight” earlier this week to make this very point. He reminded viewers that there are two counties in Pennsylvania that are directly tied for the highest poverty rate. One is in Philadelphia and the other is Fayette County, which is along the border of West Virginia and 95% white. That truth rarely gets its deserved airtime, yet it is central to the stakes of this moment. Vague political language like “spending cuts,” “entitlement reform” and “deficit reduction” allow harmful assumptions to do the dirty work. Vague political language like “spending cuts,” “entitlement reform” and “deficit reduction” allow harmful assumptions to do the dirty work. It keeps people from realizing that when Congress cuts SNAP, they’re not punishing a stereotype. They’re punishing real people. The single mother in Appalachia. The retiree in Arizona. The family in Detroit living paycheck to paycheck. Many of them are Trump voters, including both his die-hard supporters and those who say they were fed up with inflation and looking for change last November. They will soon suffer from these cuts, too. So why did they vote against their own interests? Because they’ve been sold a story, one that says that the “takers” are Black and brown and implicitly promises that the pain will be inflicted on someone else. One that allows some people in poverty to think that they’re the virtuous ones who are being held back and that the cuts will only affect the “waste, fraud and abuse” coming from somewhere else. The truth will become clear soon enough. Some of these voters may come to realize they’ve been sold a bill of goods. Let’s hope that the horrific effects of this legislation eventually cause a moment of reckoning for the people who continue to try to sell the lie of the “welfare queen” to justify their own cruelty. For more thought-provoking insights from Michael Steele, Alicia Menendez and Symone Sanders-Townsend, watch “The Weeknight” every Monday-Friday at 7 p.m. ET on MSNBC.
Symone D. Sanders Townsend is an author and a co-host of "The Weeknight." 
