It should surprise no one that Monday night, in an interview in the safe space of Fox News, Donald Trump turned his attention to the plight of the homeless, and it is not too much of a plot spoiler to say that his views lacked any vestige of fellow feeling or empathy.. After all, there really is no group of vulnerable people in America whom the president does not despise, be they immigrants, the disabled, or African-Americans. So when the Washington Post writes that the president indicated he wants to address “the crisis of people on the streets,” in the paper’s phrasing, the phrasing leaves ambiguous what it should not: since the crisis the president actually identifies is the terrible offense that people living on the streets give to passers-by, as opposed to the urgent moral need to relieve their suffering; the plight of the homeless turns out to be the plight of everyone but the homeless. From police “getting sick just by walking the beat,” to office workers forced to “walk through a scene that nobody would have believed possible three years ago,” to world leaders visiting the United States who “can’t be looking at that,” Donald Trump is appalled by the pain inflicted on the non-homeless. He speaks almost as if it were an aesthetic issue for him, a matter of city surfaces that just need the filth scrubbed away.
For Trump, there is no context, no interest in why a person might end up on the streets, and no apprehension of any humanity behind the eyesore. His ideas for how to resolve matters are both all-encompassing and ominous. “We have to take the people. And we have to do something [. . .] 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.”
But as concerning as the president’s language is, and how revealing it is of Trump’s essential brokenness — he doesn’t even bother to fake the empathy he’s incapable of feeling — it wouldn’t be half as ominous if it weren’t a close cousin to the attitude regularly displayed by countless business associations and government officials, who talk about homelessness less as a humanitarian crisis and more as a problem that hurts profits and threatens tourism. And it is also not many more steps removed from the postures of disregard and borderline cruelty that I often hear from otherwise normal, indeed liberal people here in Portland, too many of whom see our municipal and collective failures to end homelessness as convincing evidence that the homeless themselves must be to blame, with all the destructive and dehumanizing consequences of that conclusion.
In these respects, then, we should be worried not simply about the president’s personal attitudes, but in the way that what comes across as more or less outright sociopathy is shared, if in varying degrees, by millions of other Americans. That the president has cycled to this issue, however incidentally and temporarily, adds new evidence to a sense that the U.S. has catastrophically failed to gauge the degrading impact of the homeless crisis, not just on its victims, but on our common morality and democracy. We have all woven into the fabric of American society a weave that also, paradoxically, lies outside it, serving as a constant reminder of how hideously low it is possible to fall in this country, while providing the most financially strapped reassurance that at least their plight isn’t as bad as it could get. In tolerating the intolerable, and by convincing ourselves of the limits of our individual responsibility, of how far society’s protections extend, and of government’s allowed scope of action in preserving the civil and human rights of all Americans, the spectacle of homelessness has proved fine training to prepare us for the likes of Donald Trump. So perhaps when the president’s remarks, chilling and oddly abstract, catch our attention, and invite condemnation, we would do well to follow them to their collective source.