November 27, 2025
For Voters in Kentucky, Trump Is Losing His Luster
By Nic Wong
In Martin County, the government shutdown and attacks on food stamps have exposed Donald Trump’s empty promises. To many, that makes him just another politician.
On an April morning in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson landed in Martin County, Kentucky, stepping from Marine One to the hollers of a rural county where 60 percent of residents lived in poverty. With reporters and photographers from Time and Life in tow, Johnson ended up on the cabin porch of Tom Fletcher, a father of eight who had been unemployed for two years. After listening to the Fletchers tell him their story, Johnson came down from the porch, turned toward the press corps, and declared: “I have called for a national war on poverty. Our objective: total victory.”
Johnson was referring to a pronouncement he had made earlier that year, before a joint session of Congress during his State of the Union address, when he declared his “War on Poverty.” Martin County, he made clear, would be on the front line.
By August, Johnson signed the Food Stamp Act, which—along with Medicaid, Medicare, and Head Start—federalized the tools he had promised to deploy during that tour through places like Martin County.
This month, the longest government shutdown in US history brought the deepest disruption to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program since Johnson made it permanent. In Martin County, families are preparing for Thanksgiving as roughly 23 percent of residents, or around 1,300 households, rely on SNAP to put food on the table. And while the shutdown is over, a return to the status quo is not enough for many voters.
