Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
2.5 million Americans lost their food assistance in the months after Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill. The Pentagon summoned the Pope’s ambassador to a closed-door lecture after he criticized Trump. The FBI arrested a Delta Force whistleblower who exposed sexual harassment two days after Trump threatened to jail journalists. And the Justice Department is preparing a report to justify pardoning people who blocked patients from entering abortion clinics.
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Let’s dive in.
2.5 Million Americans Lost Food Stamps. The USDA Called It Good News.
On July 4th, 2025, Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. By December, the results were in.
At least 2.5 million low-income people lost help affording groceries after the bill added new requirements for SNAP and shifted hundreds of millions of dollars in costs from the federal government to states.
Around 6% of the 41 million Americans enrolled in SNAP when Trump signed the bill were no longer receiving benefits by the end of the year. Full-year 2025 data from the USDA shows an even bigger drop: 3.4 million people, roughly 8% of the program’s total.
Arizona was the largest outlier, with a whopping 47% of people in the program (about 424,000 people) losing benefits in 2025. Arizona’s unemployment rate rose over the same period, while the cost of groceries rose about 4%.
The people of Arizona did not stop being hungry. They stopped being counted.
The researchers noted the drop happened without any improvement in economic conditions. No decline in unemployment, nothing to suggest people had simply stopped needing food. That indicates people are moving off the rolls due to changes in the program, not because their circumstances improved.
Many provisions of the law haven’t even gone into effect yet. The error rate penalties start in 2028. This is the early data.
The Pentagon Called the Pope Into the Principal’s Office
There was no record in modern history of a Vatican official taking a meeting at the Pentagon. There is now.
Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his State of the World address, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door meeting. Sources described it as a bitter lecture.
Colby reportedly told the cardinal that the United States “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world,” and that the Catholic Church “had better take its side.”
At one point, a U.S. official invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period in the 14th century when the French monarchy used military force to bend the Church into submission, eventually forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon.
The White House called the account highly exaggerated. The Holy See, for its part, canceled the Pope’s planned visit to the United States.
Leo has publicly criticized Trump and his administration repeatedly, first for the migrant crackdown, then for the war on Iran. When Trump posted on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” Leo responded directly from his country residence: “Today, as we all know, there was this threat against all the people of Iran. This is truly unacceptable.”
He went on to call the war “unjust” and said it was “not resolving anything,” only producing an economic crisis, an energy crisis, and more hatred throughout the world. He wasn’t wrong.
The FBI Arrested a Whistleblower Two Days After Trump Threatened to Jail Journalists
The timing, the administration would like you to think, is a coincidence.
A federal grand jury charged 40-year-old Courtney Williams of Wagram, North Carolina, with willfully transmitting national defense information, a violation of the Espionage Act. Williams had worked as an operational support specialist assigned to a Special Military Unit at Fort Bragg between 2010 and 2016, during which time she held a top secret security clearance.
The journalist she allegedly spoke with was Seth Harp, whose 2025 book and accompanying Politico article feature Williams throughout. Williams described a workplace culture of sexual harassment at Delta Force: higher-ups massaging her shoulders, making lewd comments, being propositioned for sex.
The classified information prosecutors are supposedly focused on is tactical procedures Harp published alongside those accounts.
The indictment was announced two days after Trump threatened criminal charges against journalists who published details of the military rescue operation in Iran. Kash Patel then went on social media and bragged about Williams’ arrest, calling it a message.
Harp, for his part, called Williams “a brave whistleblower and truth-teller.” He noted that former Delta Force operators disclose national defense information on podcasts and YouTube channels regularly, but that “the government is going after Courtney for the sole reason that she exposed sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the unit.”
Apparently, it’s only okay to leak information to journalists if you do it by Signal.
Kash Patel Is Investigating Himself Over Prosecutions of Anti-Abortion Protestors
The Department of Justice is expected to release a report as early as next week concluding that the Biden administration “politically targeted” abortion opponents by prosecuting them for physically blocking patients from entering abortion clinics.
The nearly 60-page draft seeks to justify Trump’s pardons of two dozen defendants convicted during the Biden administration of blockading abortion clinics, threatening violence, and verbally assaulting patients and staff. The argument, in short, is that charging people for blocking clinic doors was religious discrimination.
Several of the people Trump pardoned have since been rearrested multiple times for blockading abortion clinics. The pardons did not appear to function as a deterrent so much as a permission slip.
The man who led many of the original Biden-era prosecutions the report is designed to discredit? Kash Patel, now FBI Director. He prosecuted FACE Act cases as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division. He also prosecuted two FACE Act cases against people who vandalized anti-abortion pregnancy centers and led a DOJ task force on violence against reproductive health care providers.
Patel is now overseeing the FBI investigation into whether those prosecutions were politically motivated. He is, in other words, investigating himself. In a different administration, this would have been flagged as a conflict of interest. In this one, it’s a Thursday.
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