Donald Trump headed to California on Tuesday for a series of private fundraisers, but he also used the trip to test the waters of a new Trump-led campaign to attack liberal states over high rates of homelessness, a problem which he says did not exist until two years ago and which, allegedly, he now feels very strongly about. Just what Trump intends to do about it remains unclear, but reporting so far suggests the administration is focused primarily on a policing-based approach, possibly involving rounding up the homeless and putting them into new federal facilities.
Forcibly putting homeless people in camps would be, ahem, illegal in most circumstances, which suggests that at least so far the White House has no particular interest in finding credible solutions to homelessness. It is, instead, an issue to be campaigned upon—one that just happens to mirror the longstanding Fox News propagandists' obsession with painting America's liberal states as unlivable hellholes. Trump wants footage to be able to show at the next Republican National Convention; Trump has no more interest in alleviating a crisis of homelessness than he has in his staff properly following government e-mail retention protocols.
It does give Trump another chance to demonstrate that he is utterly and completely devoid of human empathy. Aboard Air Force One, he complained bitterly to reporters about the real victims of homelessness: the wealthy tenants forced to look at them.
“We have people living in our … best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings ... where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes, where they went to those locations because of the prestige,” he said. “In many cases, they came from other countries and they moved to Los Angeles or they moved to San Francisco because of the prestige of the city, and all of a sudden they have tents. Hundreds and hundreds of tents and people living at the entrance to their office building. And they want to leave. And the people of San Francisco are fed up, and the people of Los Angeles are fed up.”
Donald wants to do something about homelessness not because he gives a flying damn about the plight of tens of thousands of Americans who cannot afford shelter, but because tenants of "prestige" properties are "fed up" with people "living at the entrance" of their buildings. Donald does not want the homelessness crisis to be solved: He merely wants the homeless to be removed, like vermin.
The rest of the administration's actions suggest that this, indeed, will be the focus—if any action is taken at all. Although Ben Carson, still clinging to his position in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, has been conscripted to echo Trump's new scripts, Carson's HUD has consistently taken steps to make homelessness worse rather than better. News reports instead suggest the administration underlings tasked with promoting Trump's new agenda are focused on "policing"-based solutions—a thin euphemism for clearing them from our "best highways" and "best entrances to buildings" by force. "Policing" cannot put them in homes.
This is all going to be exceedingly nasty, in other words. Trump, a psychopathic and dim-minded twit, has no interest in the problem other than as a political tool and, apparently, an opportunity to use the force of the federal government to improve the view from the lobbies of his own buildings. At best he and Fox News will be spending the next year or so working each other into a froth with newly incendiary claims about homelessness and Our Nation's Liberal Hellholes; at worst his staff, forever being purged of anyone who pipes up with the slightest concerns about illegality or rank cruelty, sincerely intends to round up homeless Americans so that Donald and his rich friends don’t have to look at them.