America’s exhausted — and not just from inflation, rent, or the nine-to-five that turned into a nine-to-nine. There’s another kind of exhaustion we don’t name out loud: the fatigue of paying for people you don’t trust, programs you think don’t work, neighbors you swear game the system.

It’s called poverty fatigue. Not the poverty itself — the fatigue of living shoulder-to-shoulder with it, funding it, hearing the stories: the lobster on EBT, the Cadillac Queen, the able-bodied guy who says he’s too sick to work but somehow does odd jobs for cash. Some of it’s myth. Some of it’s real. All of it sits in your gut when you see your taxes go up and your block stay the same.

This is not new. Reagan’s “welfare queen” was a fable with a shred of truth. It became moral fuel for a generation who felt they were scraping while others schemed. The resentment stuck.

I’ve lived in Germany and England. There, the safety net is a hammock. If you fall, you bounce gently — unemployment benefits, housing, healthcare, all catch you before you crack your teeth. In America, the net is a frayed fishing line six inches off the pavement. Fall, break your nose, then maybe the line snags your ankle before you hit rock bottom.

COVID gave Americans a glimpse of a higher net — stimulus checks, beefed-up unemployment. It didn’t last. But that brief taste burned the question in people’s heads: Why can’t it feel like this all the time?

Meanwhile, the Left drifted deeper into temple-and-lepers politics: defending the most marginalized, the truly destitute, the moral symbols of the kingdom of heaven. And that’s good — but they forgot about the plumbers, the line cooks, the Uber dads. They forgot the working class is the real populist block: huge in number, deeply skeptical, and always aware of who’s actually scraping and who’s skating.

Now enter Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. Massive tax cuts for the rich and the working class: no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime. Does it mostly help billionaires? Absolutely. Does the deficit explode? Sure. But it’s also the only bone tossed to the middle — the people who think they’ll never get a European hammock and are tired of carrying someone else’s weight.

The new wave — folks like Zohran Mamdani in New York — have made it explicit: democracy means democratic socialism. More programs. More net. More taxes. And the Right knows it, which is why you hear: “We’re a republic, not a democracy!” It’s not pedantry; it’s a gut check. They see the variable change — and they push back.

This is the part the Left misses: fatigue mutates. It turns into blame. Blame turns into votes. Poverty fatigue is real — and it votes. The same people who say blessed are the poor on Sunday want their streets back on Monday. They want to believe in the safety net — but they don’t trust Caesar to hold it up.

So when Trump stands there and says, “I see you — here’s something for you, too,” it lands. Because they’d rather be thrown a bone now than told the hammock is coming later.

Poverty fatigue is bigger than the budget line. It’s deeper than the think tank numbers. It’s moral, primal, petty, and American as hell. And it’s not going away.

Chris Abraham writes about the psychic costs of the safety net, the kingdom of heaven, and the busted street math we all do when nobody’s looking.