April 19, 2023
A Gazette Editorial
As the Civilized World pauses to remember the Holocaust this week, former president Trump dropped a new video demonizing the homeless and promising to relocate them to camps. You never really know, with this guy, if it was just deplorable timing or if he was explicitly signalling to his Nazi base that concentration camps are now on the table. He is well known for using a ‘people are saying‘ formulation to retain just enough plausible deniability to cloak his fascist pronouncements. We all remember his chilling remark about Hillary Clinton that “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people – maybe there is, I don’t know.” He never said people should shoot his opponent, right? He said he ‘didn’t know.’ And on January 6, he never told anyone to beat up cops and invade the Capitol. He only said we won’t have a country anymore if Congress certifies his opponent the winner. Big diff, right? (insert eye roll emoji here).
Trump’s othering of the urban homeless population must be viewed in the context of labeling their mere presence undesirable, a serious threat to the good people he cares about, and a problem that he alone can fix. When @AuschwitzMuseum points out that dehumanizing speech is the prelude to atrocity, we had better pay attention.
“Our first consideration should be the rights and safety of the hardworking, law-abiding citizens who make our society function. When I am back in the White House, we will use every tool, lever, and authority to get the homeless off our streets. We want to take care of them, but they have to be off our streets.
“…Under my strategy, working with states, we will BAN urban camping wherever possible. Violators of these bans will be arrested, but they will be given the option to accept treatment and services if they are willing to be rehabilitated. Many of them don’t want that, but we will give them the option.
“We will then open up large parcels of inexpensive land, bring in doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, and drug rehab specialists, and create tent cities where the homeless can be relocated and their problems identified. We will open up our cities again, make them livable and make them beautiful.
“…This is how I will end the scourge of homelessness and make our cities clean, and safe, and beautiful once again. We will do it. We will bring back America.”
Trump is a guy who always punches down. He doesn’t connect gentrification or apartment warehousing by his fellow landlords to the expanding population of Americans priced out of housing. In NYC, the number of stabilized apartments being warehoused and the population living on the street or in shelters is almost the same: 60,000. But in Trumps formulation, the homeless themselves are the problem, not a symptom or the inevitable result of an inadequate housing supply, and the solution he offers is to simply get rid of them. Not to open up some of those warehoused units, or to convert any of the thousands of vacant offices into affordable housing. Lack of housing resource isn’t the problem, in Trump’s view. That guy shivering on the subway steps is the problem.
Hitler made a comparable pitch. “Those people” are standing between good Germans and the decent, comfortable life they deserve. Get rid of them and everything will be Shangri-La. ‘I will end the scourge of homelessness and make our cities clean, and safe, and beautiful once again.’ We’ve seen this before, and we know how it ends. We know what happened when Nazis demonized and dehumanized their fellow human beings. Millions were murdered.
This is nothing to minimize, excuse or claim ambiguity. One of our two major party’s leading candidate for president just proposed relocating people to camps. Never Again Really Is Now.
