Return of the Black Triangle

There's a trick behind Trump's revival of homeless hate

© 2014 Garry Knight, used under a Creative Commons license

Politico:

No issue is dominating the agenda in California like the housing shortage and homelessness spike, with mayors, state lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom grappling to ameliorate an epidemic that is unavoidable on city streets.

But a Washington Post report that the Trump administration is considering demolishing homeless encampments and moving unhoused people into government facilities caught elected officials here off guard. Mayors were left trying to determine if they were dealing with a speculative threat or the possibility of concrete, drastic action.

Let's make this nice and simple, so simple that the dopes at Politico could understand it if they were not constitutionally incapable of understanding anything.

Donald Trump doesn’t care about anything but himself. He perhaps cares about his children as extensions of himself, but that’s it. All his relationships are utterly transactional — there has never been any hint in the public record or in personal accounts that he has ever or would ever do anything solely to give another person pleasure or comfort, rather than to cause some benefit for himself. Not even his so-called friends and devoted flunkies, so far as I have seen, has even pretended to thus portray him.

This applies to Trump’s policy decisions, if we can even call them that. Some reporters and other observers focus on his more puzzling decisions as if they were manifestations of an exotic mental illness. Imagine, they will say, a President of the United States defending his own self-evident lie about a weather event, is he crazy! What is with his impulse control?

But I submit it wasn’t mere pique that motivated him in the Dorian/Alabama case: Trump wanted to force a result that increased his power. Fooling the rubes who flock to Twitter to say hell yeah Trump is showing up the lying media no matter what gibberish he spews is not a worthwhile goal — he can always get that rump of voters to eat shit and call it chocolate.

No, he wanted to force a federal agency to his will and to embarrass itself, as NOAA did by backing his lie — he even engaged Wilbur Ross, the most crooked member of his criminal cabinet (and that my friends is saying something), to issue threats to make it happen. That was the goal. Because it showed his power: Could Obama have made a top federal official debase himself like that?

Now, Trump has a political thing going with regard to Those Filthy Cities, because he knows how his most loyal rural voters think: They may be living in Fritters, Alabama, where a third of the citizens spend their working days ankle-deep in chicken shit, but they consider themselves true-blue Hoot Booj-wahsee, while in them there cities they got bums shitting all over the place! In a proud cowboy subdivision like Skillet, Texas, a feller might relieve himself out o’ doors if he been a-drinkin’, thass just good ol’ boys bein’ good an’ ol’, but if a feller shit or pissed out o’ doors because he was too dang poor he had no indoor place to go, well sir we GIT A ROPE.

Trump’s factota do sometimes try this routine on New York City, but not even his rubes are that dumb, so he and they slam other cities: Chicago is full of ooga-booga, Baltimore likewise, and San Francisco and Los Angeles are filthy-dirty plague carriers; in fact, an LA case of typhus — or rather, “a City Hall East employee who is convinced she caught typhus last November from fleas in her office,” per NBC — has become one of their talking points. “Bubonic Plague In Los Angeles?” cries Matt Vespa at TownHall. “Is California On The Verge Of Becoming A Third-World State?” (Vespa was a key part of the successful drive to get The Hunt banned because some dumbass thought it was about killing Trump voters, and apparently hopes to expand his Big Lie portfolio.)

So as far as rank propaganda is concerned, Trump threatening to expand his concentration camp population from immigrants to include the homeless is a slight intensification of his usual shittiness. But though he will probably (not certainly) be stopped from going full Zyklon-B by the courts, you may be sure he wants more than a propaganda boost — he wants a tangible result that demonstrates an increase in his power. He wants to get some federal department to go all-in on the plan, and agree to go in there, kidnap the bums, slap a black triangle on them and put them in camps run on their child prison model, from which once again reporters will strain to get out the truth about the deliberately cruel and inhuman treatment, and outrage-weary voters eventually will have to console themselves that bad as it may be, it’s not like they have any friends or loved ones among the victims.

Then will come the walk of shame. Who will it be? HUD? Homeland Security? Health and Human Services? The respective Secretaries of these departments (well, not HUD — Ben Carson is too brain-damaged to know what’s going on) are currently panicking, wondering if it’s their turn to be driven from polite society. But there’ll be some compensation; maybe he’ll let them in on some of the contractor dollars to be made from the new facilities. And who knows? Maybe the country really is on the verge of its final collapse, and if so they’d be fools not to get with even the grubbier parts of the program and grab all they could…

As I’ve said many times: These people are mad and must be stopped.