Trump’s germophobia was always going to harm the homeless

The news, in brief …

• From Times Square to Montana, shootings reveal ongoing U.S. gun crisis

  Conspiracy-fueled violence and nationwide mass shootings highlight ongoing gun violence challenges. Read more.

• Trump accuses “degenerate” Pelosi of insider trading

  The president said the Democratic representative was using her legislative position to game the stock market. Read more.

• Dean Cain becomes an ICE agent amid Hollywood backlash

  The former Superman star’s enlistment comes as ICE drops age limits, offers bonuses and faces gender gap criticism. Read more.

Make me smarter …

There is no “two-state solution.” Can we stop pretending?

No meaningful Palestinian state will exist anytime in the foreseeable future. Facing that truth is crucial. Read more.

A little trouble at the country seat

Donald Trump has long believed in “unclean” people.

The president’s penchant for avoiding handshakes is well-known, and the first term of his “Purell presidency” would have reshaped S.O.P. for White House staff even before a global pandemic made such precautions necessary.

The self-described “germaphobe” president tends to describe things he doesn’t like in terms of grime. Hillary Clinton was a “nasty” woman. “The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg was “filthy, dirty, disgusting.” This belief in Donald Trump, who is clean, and others, who are not, was bound to blend with his conservative politics in unsettling ways.

Even though blue-blood New Yorkers considered him and his father to be jumped-up Johnny-come-latelies from the pigsty outer boroughs, Trump has claimed to be from A1 genetic stock when out of the Mayflower Society’s earshot. His desire to be accepted into circles that believed in marrying well and the sanctity of their bloodlines has left Trump with a simmering belief in eugenics and none of the WASP tact that would have allowed him to sugarcoat it. On the campaign trail in 2024, he couldn’t help but talk about American immigrants as refuse, calling the country a “garbage can for the world.”

Trump’s nagging obsession with dirt reappeared over the weekend, after he announced plans to clear out the city’s homeless population in language that was familiar to both regular followers of Trump's tirades and 20th-century historians.

Calling for the “cleanliness and general physical renovation” of the nation’s capital, Trump promised to clean out the “tents, squalor, filth” that have made the city “dirtier and less attractive.” In an unsettling echo of the last century’s fascists, Trump promised to move the homeless population to some unspecified elsewhere.

Trump made it back into office on an explicitly anti-immigrant agenda, touting the inferiority of their genes. Earlier this month, he celebrated an ad campaign praising the “good genes” of a blond-haired, blue-eyed actress. Now he’s preparing to ship the homeless population out of the capital in the name of cleanliness and a return to national glory. We’ve seen this all before, and that’s both the most comforting and most frightening aspect of this moment.

What do you think? Is Trump’s apparent move to purge the homeless from Washington, D.C., a first step toward something even more sinister? Is Trump’s obsession with genes bound to play out in ever-more-disgusting ways? Sound off in the comments.

Support our bold journalism: Become a Salon member today.

Before you go …

How did we get from the ’60s to Trump’s kitsch White House?

Our culture turned on itself, stagnated and went rancid — that's how. Read more.

ALSO FROM SALON