The prestige of the city

Apparently some people made the mistake of thinking that when Trump made noises about homeless people he was actually worrying about the homeless people. Pause for raucous mirth. Come on now – we all know better than that.

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.

Stop, stop, it’s too much.

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.”

Look. These are rich cities full of rich people and they’re not supposed to have to look at disgusting poor people. Their cleaners and gardeners are supposed to do their work out of sight of the rich people, and the peons who live in the city are supposed to live their nasty little lives out of sight. What good is it being rich if you have to look at dirty nasty poor people all day?

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