According to the president, wealthy foreigners are livid about what the homeless are doing to their investments.
Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that President Donald Trump had ordered White House officials to launch a massive effort to address homelessness in California, where the number of families living on the streets or lacking adequate housing has “skyrocketed.” At the time, the notion of a guy who’s made his preference for the wealthy abundantly clear expressing any sort of concern for people not rich enough to dodge taxes struck many as deeply uncharacteristic. A man who would sooner run over a homeless person with his golf cart than come face-to-face with one, burning rubber to get away as quickly as possible, suddenly caring about their plight? Really? They say a Brioni suit cannot changed its pinstripes, but maybe the president who famously refused to hire a “poor person” had experienced a come-to-Jesus moment in which he realized not everyone was born to a father wealthy enough to continually bail them out of their numerous ****-ups. Maybe he‘d even realized that his own actions, like making immigrants fearful of accessing federal assistance or aiming to slash health care for low-income Americans or pushing for cuts to public housing, had contributed to the problem.
Curious to know more, reporters asked the president about his sudden interest in addressing homelessness on Tuesday in California, where he told them that…yeah, he just doesn‘t like the sight of homeless people or what they’re doing to the values of real estate properties—especially those owned by foreign investors.
“We can’t let Los Angeles, San Francisco, and numerous other cities destroy themselves by allowing what’s happening,” Trump said aboard Air Force One, adding that the homelessness crisis is causing residents of those cities to leave the country. “They can’t believe what’s happening. 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, probably internally shuddering at the idea of homeless people crowding the entrance of Trump Tower. “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.” During a speech at a Republican conference in Baltimore last week—a city that Trump has described as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being” would “want to live”—the president said that he had put California on “notice” to “clean it up,” adding, “These are our great American cities and they’re an embarrassment.” The president has also called the homeless situation in San Francisco “inappropriate” and the city “disgusting,” because his empathy runs deep.
