RUTHFULLY YOURS

Because World War III has not yet started (and we don’t believe that the targeted killing of a terrorist will start it), President Trump is turning his gimlet eye and wonderful sense of humor back to domestic issues. Monday night, he had a message for Democrat-run cities, mostly in California.

It’s no secret that West Coast Democrat-run cities are having disastrous problems with rampant homelessness. As a West Coast native, I know that some of it has to do with the temperate climate. It’s easier to live on the streets with a temperature range between 50°F and 80°F than it is when the lows drop below freezing and the highs are near 100°F.

Temperature alone, though, does not account for the homeless crisis in California cities, as well as similar crises in other Democrat-run cities such as Seattle or New York. The problem is one of management.

In each of these cities, either state or local Democrat governments made conscious decisions to stop enforcing quality of life laws, such as preventing execratory functions in the street, and to allow low level crime, such as public drug use and small dollar thefts to become formally or informally decriminalized.

In California, voters agreed that property thefts under $950 should be considered petty theft and therefore misdemeanors. Crime soared throughout the state.

In San Francisco, the city stopped enforcing rules against urinating or defecating in the streets. San Francisco now has a “poop map” that many residents find very  helpful. The map, though, does have its limits, for it does not document the interiors of Safeway grocery stores, which are also becoming poop hazard zones.

To add to the misery, the newly elected District Attorney has announced that he will no longer prosecute any quality of life crimes. No wonder that, on Tucker Carlson Tonight, “San Francisco police Lt. Tracy McCray says the city’s left-wing prosecutors are to blame for rising crime and disorder in the city.”

In Los Angeles, thanks to uncontrolled homelessness, with thousands of people living in the streets, the city is seeing a resurgence of diseases associated with the Middle Ages or war zones. Public health officials are worried about an outbreak of bubonic plague and a city employee caught typhus from the homeless clustered around her office building.

Speaking of bubonic plague, Sacramento, which is California’s state capital, is experiencing a plague of rats. Typically for California, those charged with ridding the city of rats have been getting pushback from various environmental groups, with some groups arguing for predator animals to do the killing, but only some predators, and others objecting to rat poison.

Further north, in Seattle, a local news station produced a viral video showcasing that city’s homeless crisis. The video emphasized what most people in Democrat-run cities already know, which is that homelessness is not a problem of poverty, but of substance abuse, often paired with mental illness. (Debate rages about which comes first, the mental illness or the substance abuse.)

Heather MacDonald has observed that, when it comes to drugs and homelessness, San Francisco is an inviting environment. The drugs are freely available, there are no criminal penalties for their use, and myriad private and government charities provide food and, when wanted, shelter and medical care. The fact that ordinary people would find these conditions awful does not apply to drug abusers, who find them more than adequate. “If you build it they will come,” and all that.

All of the above problems are driven by local political decisions. So, of course, California’s hard-Left Governor Gavin Newsom placed the blame squarely where it belonged . . . on Donald Trump:

Gov. Gavin Newsom accused the Trump administration Wednesday of intentionally withholding key data on California’s homeless population, preventing the state from addressing a surging crisis.

Newsom said his administration would begin accepting applications for nearly $500 million in state funding set aside for local programs to fight homelessness, even though the federal government has yet to release the final point-in-time homeless counts that are typically used to determine how that money is distributed.

The governor’s office said the Trump administration has put up “politicized roadblocks” for California by refusing to release the data, even though cities and counties conducted their counts and sent the results to the federal government for approval months ago.

“California is making historic investments now to help our communities fight homelessness,” Newsom said in a statement. “But we have work to do and we need the federal government to do its part.”

On Monday night, Trump had a message for Newsom and all of the other Democrat Party politicians who have turned once great cities into giant, filthy, disease-infested skid rows:

Trump is absolutely right in his first tweet. Regarding the second tweet, it’s wrong for citizens in well-run communities to have to pay for California’s, and other Democrat-run enclaves’, poor policies. The only reason the federal government should step in would be to prevent epidemic disease from breaking out of those diseased hellholes and into the general population.

But aside from disagreeing with the offer to extend federal aid, one can’t help but admire Trump’s epic trolling.