This Trump answer involves musings about people with mental illnesses, a suggestion he cleansed DC streets so foreign leaders wouldn't have to see unsightly homeless people, and a suggestion he might "intercede" to rid other cities of "that whole thing." https://t.co/KYOa7WylsZ
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) July 2, 2019
President Trump said Monday that he wanted to address the crisis of people on the streets, telling Fox News in an interview that his administration “may intercede” to clean up cities such as Washington, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The president made the remarks in an interview he taped in Japan with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, after Carlson asked him about cities in Japan, which Carlson said are clean and free from graffiti and “junkies.” American cities, by comparison, have a problem with “filth,” Carlson noted.
“It’s a phenomena that started two years ago,” Trump said, drawing a connection between the beginning of this and the early days of his time in the White House. “It’s disgraceful.”
The numbers of homeless people in the United States has stayed relatively level in the three years between 2016 and 2018, ticking up from 550,000 to 553,000 last year. But these numbers represent a significant drop over the past decade. An average of 630,000 people experienced homelessness per year between 2007 and 2012, according to federal data. And an average of 580,000 people were homeless a year between 2012 and 2015.
The president went on at some length, painting a dark picture of life in some American cities without giving specifics for how he would address the issue.
“Police officers are getting sick just by walking the beat,” he claimed. “We cannot ruin our cities. And you have people that work in those cities. They work in office buildings and to get into the building, they have to walk through a scene that nobody would have believed possible three years ago."
“We have to take the people,” he said. “And we have to do something.”
Trump did not mention the word homeless during the segment, so it was difficult to glean his exact meaning or how he would address the issue. He blamed liberals and “sanctuary cities.”
“When we have leaders of the world coming in to see the president of the United States and they’re riding down a highway, they can’t be looking at that,” he said. “They can’t be looking at scenes like you see in Los Angeles and San Francisco . . . So we’re looking at it very seriously. We may intercede. We may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up.”
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He also said he personally “ended” some issues in this regard in the District of Columbia but did not elaborate.
“You know, I had a situation when I first became president,” Trump said, “We had certain areas of Washington, D.C., where that was starting to happen, and I ended it very quickly. I said, ‘You can’t do that.’ ”
The Trump administration has eyed federal housing programs for deep budget cuts despite recent successes in reducing homelessness.