Asked about urban decay and homelessness, Trump offers senseless, babbling answer
Donald Trump recently gave a remarkable response to a question about “filth” in US cities from Fox News host Tucker Carlson. In an interview that must be seen to be believed, Trump babbles incoherently when discussing the problem of poverty and homelessness.
The son of a billionaire started off by saying:
It’s disgraceful. I’m gonna maybe – and I’m looking at it very seriously, we’re doing some other things as you probably noticed like some of the very important things that we’re doing now. But we’re looking at it very seriously because you can’t do that. You can’t have what’s happening – where police officers are getting sick just by walking the beat. I mean they’re getting actually very sick, where people are getting sick, where the people living there are living in hell too – although some of them have mental problems where they don’t even know they’re living that way. In fact, perhaps they like living that way. They can’t do that. 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.
Trump proceeded to blame “the liberal establishment”, without further explanation.
Trump: “It hurts our country” for foreign leaders to see poverty
Perhaps most tellingly, he said:
I had a situation when I first became president: we had certain areas of Washington DC where that was starting to happen – and I ended it very quickly. I said, ‘you can’t do that’. 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. I really believe that it hurts our country. They can’t be looking at scenes like you see in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Forget about government help
Trump went on to say:
Read on...
[W]e’re looking at it very seriously. We may intercede, we may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up; it’s inappropriate. Now, we have to take the people and do something. We have to do something. And you know we’re really not very equipped as a government to be doing that kind of work; that’s not really the kind of work that the government probably should be doing.
Poverty is endemic in the US
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness:
A total of 552,830 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in 2018… (33 percent) are people in families with children.
That also doesn’t include the 4.4 million people in poor households who were living with family and friends in 2017 (25% more than in 2007).
And according to the Institute for Policy Studies:
55 percent of Americans struggle to pay medical bills, 40 percent of adults have less than $400 in savings, and nearly half of renters can’t afford housing costs
The sooner people accept that poverty is a political choice, the sooner we can start dealing with it properly.
Featured image via YouTube – Secular Talk
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When you ask him a serious question about poverty and homeless peoples, or even decay, he has no idea , it’s not one of the popular areas he likes to be asked something like North Korea or Putin or Mexico . He cannot answer the question on poverty he has no idea or little interest, it’s not fashionable for his mind or brain sadly.
He’s and a few others in the USA hd interests in making sure history saw them as great men people like Bush , you had Obama, who did try and help the poorest , sadly once he was out you had people like Trump who have tried to get rid of the medicare which are helping millions of poverty stricken peoples .
The UK is following this ideology or making sure the poorest stay at the bottom , like a lot of our leaders poverty comes really low down in an agenda to make the rich richer sadly.
Maybe Trump’s incoherence makes more since if we consider that it is a reflection of the incoherence which has befuddled US social policies for the last 60 years.
Obama may have been articulate and coherent in his surface responses. It does beg the question, however, why it is that, over the course of two terms – and particularly during his first term when he was in a far more powerful position – he did nothing either to institute social reforms, nor to reform the US education system, nor to reverse American foreign policy across Latin America.
It concerns me that laughing at Trump is a way to distract from the far more pernicious corruption that sits at the heart of US politics, and has done so ever since WWII.
We see Democrats trying to institute social reforms today – when they don’t have a hope in hell of getting them through – when they so signally did not during times when such motions could have succeeded. I wouldn’t want to suggest that this represents a conscious bias. I do think it’s worth reflecting on.
Does Trump, because he is so signally unaware of himself, simply bring to the surface the rottenness which has lain hidden in the background for decades?
Interesting that the programme host also believes that poverty is a political choice. That’s why neither government is interested in doing anything about the homeless crisis. The UK govt knows full well what is happening to people without resources and deliberately ignores the problem. Trump doesn’t even know or understand that there is one. Which is worse? Maybe it doesn’t matter as the outcome is the same – more impoverished people living on the streets.