The Cruelty as Governance Playbook
The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY.
I find it infuriating that the President of the United States so often posts statements that are sometimes just plain stupid, sometimes unintelligible, sometimes downright childish, and most often nonsensical, and yet the national press, without pausing to analyze what the hell he just said, treats it as serious policy.
By reporting it straight, they make it real. The comment enters the public discourse, stripped of context, as if it were a legitimate proposal rather than a spur-of-the-moment rant. This is how unserious ideas gain traction: not because they have merit, but because the press repeats them without challenge.
And really, how ridiculous is this one? Does he think there’s a fleet of homeless moving vans parked around the city, engines running, waiting for his order? If such vans existed, who’s paying them? If you can’t afford a place to live, you can’t afford movers, especially to transport the knickknacks and furniture you don’t have.
And if people just left their few belongings behind, he’d be back on Truth Social in minutes, raging about how the homeless don’t even clean up after themselves.
On July 24, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14321, “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” aimed at reducing legal protections for unhoused individuals by encouraging localities to remove them from public streets and rehouse them in treatment or institutional facilities.
But here’s the thing: that’s specifically how we got to where we are today.
that accelerated the closure of large psychiatric institutions across the country. In D.C., this meant considerably downsizing St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, a psychiatric facility that had been the city’s primary resource for mental health care since 1855.
Hundreds of patients were released with no stable housing, no ongoing treatment. Many of these people ended up on the streets, forming the visible core of the city’s homeless population for decades to come, without funded community care to catch them.
Before Reagan’s cuts, it was still common for police to enforce vagrancy laws.
I remember going to work with my father one day; his office was just off what is now Freedom Plaza (actually, it’s now called Black Lives Matter Plaza, but that reference will no doubt send some readers of this post on a tangent unrelated to this narrative). Looking out his window, I saw a man sleeping in the park. Within minutes, two police officers approached, harassed him, and eventually took him into custody.
When I asked my father why, he told me: Because he has no visible means of support; you have to be able to demonstrate that you’re a contributing member of society.
Reagan’s systematic eviction of the institutionalized only a few years later required eliminating those same laws. Without vagrancy arrests, people could remain on the streets indefinitely, no questions asked. The moral shift was equally important: it became acceptable to walk past someone sleeping on a steam grate, shake our heads, and say “tsk tsk” without ever asking why.
A few years later, well into the Reagan years, I took a girlfriend to see the National Christmas Trees on the White House grounds. As we walked the South Lawn, I noticed what looked like piles of clothing along the sidewalks. But as we got closer, I realized these weren’t piles of laundry; they were people. They were sleeping on the steam grates that tapped into the boiler rooms of the White House and nearby government buildings, using the rising heat to survive the winter cold.
That’s what I remember about Reaganomics, and the gift it left for D.C.
Trump’s plan to expand the civil commitment of homeless people is being sold as a solution, but without real housing, mental health care, and reintegration plans, it’s just a reverse-engineered version of Reagan’s mistake. If you don’t want to see tents and makeshift encampments, you fund permanent housing, voluntary treatment, and case management.
And just like in the Reagan years, the goal isn’t to solve homelessness; it’s to remove the sight of homelessness from places of political and economic importance. Come on, man, the Donald shouldn’t have to see such things on the way out of the city, headed to one of his rich-guy country clubs.
We’ve already seen what happens when leaders treat homelessness as an eyesore instead of a crisis: steam grates outside the White House, and generations living without hope or help.
Trump’s plan isn’t new. It’s just Reaganomics revisited.
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