The Trump Nobody Seems To Notice

Largely unmentioned in yesterday's news,

President Donald Trump took executive action on July 24 making it easier for cities and states to remove homeless people from the streets.

Trump signed an order directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek to reverse federal and state judicial precedents and end consent decrees that limit local and state governments' ability to move homeless people from streets and encampments into treatment centers.

. . . Trump's action comes after the Supreme Court ruled in June [2024] that that people without homes can be arrested and fined for sleeping in public spaces, overturning a lower court’s ruling that enforcing camping bans when shelter is lacking is cruel and unusual punishment.

The USA Today link is typically slipshod in not mentioning that the case was decided last year, not this past June, and it neglected to cite it by name. Here's more information on CITY OF GRANTS PASS, OREGON v. JOHNSON ET AL.:

The Supreme Court on Friday upheld ordinances in a southwest Oregon city that prohibit people who are homeless from using blankets, pillows, or cardboard boxes for protection from the elements while sleeping within the city limits. By a vote of 6-3, the justices agreed with the city, Grants Pass, that the ordinances simply bar camping on public property by everyone and do not violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

. . . In his opinion for the court, [Justice Neil] Gorsuch stressed that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment has generally applied only to methods of punishment, rather than to whether the government can criminalize particular conduct. And the fines and jail sentences at issue in this case do not, he insisted, “qualify as cruel and unusual.”

Instead, he continued, the challengers point to the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Robinson v. California, holding that the Eighth Amendment bars a state from making it a crime simply to be a drug addict. But the kinds of public camping ordinances at issue in this case bear no resemblance to the state law in Robinson, Gorsuch wrote, because they criminalize camping on public property rather than a person’s status.

The intent of Trump's executive order is to redirect federal grants and homeless programs to incentivize local governments to get homeless encampments off the streets and move people into treatment. According to thr White House,

• The overwhelming majority of these individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health disorder, or both.
• Federal and state governments have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness but not its root causes, leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats.
• Shifting these individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment is the most proven way to restore public order.

This is typical Trump 2.0 strategy. Like his approach to the Ivies, which I noted during the battle with Harvard last April, he aims to knock multiple legs from the stool on which a particular problem sits. The homeless problem exists in part because poorly reasoned court decisions have enabled it, but also because an immnensely lucrative network of policies, grants, and NGOs subsicizes it in its current form.

Los Angeles is a good example.

A federal judge issued a blistering ruling Tuesday, finding Los Angeles officials failed in multiple ways to follow a settlement agreement to create more shelter for unhoused people.

Judge David O. Carter also ordered stronger oversight by a court-appointed monitor to “ask the hard questions on behalf of Angelenos,” as well as quarterly hearings to oversee compliance with the city’s commitments to create nearly 13,000 new shelter and housing beds.

. . . He pointed to the difficulty faced by court-appointed reviewers, and LAist, in getting data from the L.A. Homeless Services Authority — known as LAHSA — about how much was being spent for more than 2,000 housing subsidies the city was taking credit for to show compliance.

. . . After LAHSA officials criticized LAist’s reporting of concerns about the data, Carter ordered the city to turn over addresses for each housing site. The city then acknowledged that the data was inflating the true number: 130 subsidies were being wrongfully counted twice.

This money is almost certainly going to members of the urban Democrat machine. But the "housing" such programs provide is little more than hotel rooms; there is no treatment for drug addiction or mental health issues. What Trump-is doing is setting up a multifaceted response to the homeless problem that will, on one hand, enable local authorities actually to clean up encampments, and on the other, restore the ability to place those with serious problems in custodial treatment, while reducing the overall incentive toward vagrancy.

What strikes me here is that this is part of an agenda. The media has been focused on Epstein for the past several weeks, but Trump doesn't appear to have spent much time with it, other than to send his Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell in prison. Insread, he's just continuing to sign executive orders.

And then there's the somewhat puzzling trip to Scotland.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt this week said the trip was intended as a "working visit that will include a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Starmer to refine the historic U.S.-U.K. trade deal."

It also seems to involve ribbon-cutting at another Trump facility, as well as continuing attempts to have the British Open take place at a Trump golf course. But the big thing it suggests to me is that Trump has an agenda, it's something he appears to have settled on during his period out of office, and he's been pursuing it singlemindedly since his return. So far, the Epstein business isn't even a minor distraction. My guess is we don't know mich of anything about what Trump actually means to do in Scotland, but Trump himself has a very good idea, and we'lll learn what it was in due time.