Dementia Watch: Trump’s newfound interest in the homeless

US News & Politics
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There is a story in the WaPo about Trump’s plan to relocate the homeless to newly set-up federal facilities in California that TPM cites this morning. This scheme seems odd on at least two counts:

  1. Trump cares about the homeless?
  2. This is a reasonable, even possible, way to deal with homelessness?

Sure, oddity from Trump is not at all remarkable. Alice had to believe seven impossible things before breakfast to get by in Wonderland, and that has been our condition during the Trump administration. So, sure, there is not any pressing need to connect any dots, to try to make this oddity understandable on any terms. It just is. It can be seen as just the latest oeuvre from Trump, Zen master of the meaningless.

This is all prelude to my attempting to connect the dots, to explain how this scheme to relocate the homeless of California to federal facilities fits into a pattern. Maybe the dots really are not at all connected. I concede that possibility. I even concede randomness as the most likely possibilitlity, but I see value in trying to find a pattern.

I see this explanation I am about to offer as part of a dementia watch, because at this point it looks like a Trump personal project, something that will never come to pass and that his handlers are pursuing just as far as necessary to keep him off the warpath. But, sure, it could also be seen as a conspiracy theory, because those handlers include Stephen Miller and other Fourth Reich enthusiasts, and those people might actually be trying to make this idea a reality.

Trump, from day one of his campaign, has told us he wants to deport all 11+ million of the undocumented. Yes, there’s Wall, and the attention paid to that oddity has tended to crowd out the other aspect of his intentions towards illegal entry into the US. He wants to keep new arrivals out, but he also wants to toss out those already here.

Since becoming president, he has found all sorts of complicated practical obstacles to achieving that simple end. He has some broad and general authority and duty to enforce our foolish and malicious existing immigration law by detaining the undocumented, but he lacks the resources to detain any more than a handful. And once detained, the undocumented have due process rights that keep them from being deported with any rapidity. So, of course his handlers have steered him more towards Wall and preventing new arrivals, which is just as irrational, but at least relatively harmless a pursuit to keep Trump occupied. Only relatively of course, and all sorts of very real harm is being done on the border.

More recently, his administration has moved to expand detention capacity for new arrivals, though the 4.7 billion extra they got recently is penny ante compared to what they will need to detain even tens of thousands, much less millions. And while they were able to get the D leadership to give them the 4.7 billion without any House oversight into conditions in the expanded detention, they really can’t expect to get anywhere near the many hundreds of billions they need without pushback and blockage by the Ds.

So Trump, master as he is of the Art of the Deal, came up with this brilliant scheme to bamboozle Ds into supporting the creation of increased federal detention capacity – sell it under the cover of housing for the homeless! Once the detention capacity exists, you repurpose it to detaining the undocumented. It’s not as if you need enough detention capacity for all 11 million, as the idea is to make the conditons of detention so marginal as to encourage the 11 million to waive their due process rights and self-deport to escape the camps.

The fact that this first step, getting D buy-in to internment camps for the homeless, won’t work, is what makes me see this as part of a dementia watch rather than a conspiracy theory. You would think that a Miller, as impractical as his vicious beliefs may be, would recognize that they won’t get the D buy-in needed to repurpose currently underused federal facilities into the infrastructure of mass detentions of the homeless. So Trump’s handlers send a few people to California to look into the matter of repurposing, but as a Potemkin Village project, so they can report back to Trump that they’re on it, they’re scoping out the plan. His handlers are trying to make sure this remains one of Trump’s brilliant, but unfulfilled ideas.

2 Likes
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I think this is a lot simpler and a lot smarter than you’re postulating. He’s found another group of people who have no power and are disliked by some subset of the population. And that dislike fits his enemy profile since it is an emotional dislike - instead of fear of immigrants, its disgust for the homeless. That set includes his entire base plus some group of urbanites who are always complaining about “those people.” One of the major comparisons made between Bloomberg and De Blasio was at least Bloomberg had a handle on the homeless problem - by hiding them and chasing them away. He’s going to increase his voting base with this move. The rest of us rational human beings who think this is completely awful - we’re never going to vote for him anyway.

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Liberal meme-watch: Racist, greedy Putin-controlled Nazi didn’t work well enough, but they can’t discard it because it’s about the only tool in their toolbox.

Solution: sharpen the tool into Racist greedy senile Putin-controlled Nazi.

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So the idea is that he gains traction with Rs by proposing massive new federal funding to house this despised group of people? That seems pretty odd, and not very smart.

Genuine right wing Rs are happy to let the homeless rot in place. Anything that makes urban hellholes a scarier and less attractive place is fine with them. That a RINO like Bloomberg wanted to get them off the streets is just proof to real Rs that Bloomberg is a RINO.

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Trump did act unhappy recently about Bahamian refugees landing in Palm Beach vicinity. He may be thinking he can get rid of homeless in Florida.

But it also suggests a new grift, federal money flowing to private facilities.

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I hope you didn’t hurt yourself straining to get all of that out.

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I always have thought the observations about Trump and dementia were on target and this certainly seems so. In the video clips from the Alabama–Dorian news conference, he had that perplexed, lost look of dementia patients. The sharpie drawing seemed like a cover for the fact that he just didn’t know what he was saying.

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Luckily, Putin is a Russian name easy to spell. I’ve seen enough hackneyed liberal scorching indictments of Trump to be able to script it myself for you. I’m in California, the mother lode for liberal propaganda.

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Hopefully it’s just grift. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the term useless eaters came back into vogue.

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Sure, any govt program that Rs undertake, and sadly, about 99% of what conventional Ds undertake, involves public/private partnerships. Under those conditions, Rs don’t really object to govt spending per se, not at all. But there are so many grift opportunities out there that they really don’t have to resort to pushing some new public/private partnership that conflicts with their entrenched ideological positions.

The perpetrators may be perfectly flexible enough to not care at all what the federal money is supposed to be doing, but if you try to direct the flow of gravy towards some new program that conflicts with the entrenched ideology, that circumstance alone attracts unwanted attention to the new grift. Much better to manage these new gifts to the private sector via existing programs, or at least along existing lines of ideology.

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Donnie is a corrupt malignant narcissist…you must always follow the money and who is grifting.