RUTHFULLY YOURS

Trump creates hysteria, both rabid antipathies and fervent support.

General chaos surrounds President Trump. Few dispute that. All argue over the origins, causes, and nature of these wild reactions to our president.

The Left’s Hatred

Take the Left’s loathing of Trump that arises from three sources.

First, Trump supposedly has no shame. The traditional leftist use of invectives such as “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe,” and “nativist” appears to have had little effect on Trump — as it seems to have done on McCain (who in 2008 ruled out attacks on Obama’s personal pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright) and Romney (who passed on standing down debate moderator and rank partisan Candy Crowley).

More likely, smearing Trump only energizes him to become even more combative and uncouth. In the past, when a progressive tagged a Republican politician as some sort of irredeemable or deplorable bigot, he often inched left in search of penance or to preempt further attacks.

In the past, when a progressive tagged a Republican politician as some sort of irredeemable or deplorable bigot, he often inched left.

Trump seems to enjoy the tumult, on the strange principle that only fire can tamp down the bias and unprofessionalism of a mostly pampered and overrated media. Does he do so by diminishing the aura and grandeur of the presidency, at least as the office is traditionally defined? Maybe, but half the country is likely to think “How dare the media smear the president?” rather than “How dare the president of these United States stoop to reply in kind to petty CNN reporters?”

Second, of course, Trump is politically dangerous to progressivism. In military terms, he is a strategic B-52 on a deep mission. Trump targets the enemy’s homeland, even as his opponents’ far-flung and attenuated expeditionary armies bog down abroad.

The Obama era gave us the conventional banality that “demography is destiny.” A supposedly 67 percent so-called white population would inevitably shrink into electoral insignificance, gnashing its teeth in its “white privilege” irrelevance.

All who declared themselves nonwhite (to the extent that is still possible in a racially mixed, intermarried, often assimilated and integrated America) would grow in number. And they would purportedly vote in accordance with their perceived appearances and tribal affiliations. That calculus would inevitably mean that states such as Georgia and Arizona would soon follow the paradigm of California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico: They’d flip blue.

A liberal-created failure that goes entirely ignored is the left’s harmful agenda for society’s most vulnerable people — the mentally ill. Eastern State Hospital, built in 1773 in Williamsburg, Virginia, was the first public hospital in America for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Many more followed. Much of the motivation to build more mental institutions was to provide a remedy for the maltreatment of mentally ill people in our prisons. According to professor William Gronfein at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, by 1955 there were nearly 560,000 patients housed in state mental institutions across the nation. By 1977, the population of mental institutions had dropped to about 160,000 patients.

Starting in the 1970s, advocates for closing mental hospitals argued that because of the availability of new psychotropic drugs, people with mental illness could live among the rest of the population in an unrestrained natural setting. According to a 2013 Wall Street Journal article by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, titled “Fifty Years of Failing America’s Mentally Ill” (http://tinyurl.com/y9l8ujww), shutting down mental hospitals didn’t turn out the way advocates promised. Several studies summarized by the Treatment Advocacy Center show that untreated mentally ill are responsible for 10 percent of homicides (and a higher percentage of the mass killings). They are 20 percent of jail and prison inmates and more than 30 percent of the homeless.

We often encounter these severely mentally ill individuals camped out in libraries, parks, hospital emergency rooms and train stations and sleeping in cardboard boxes. They annoy passers-by with their sometimes intimidating panhandling. The disgusting quality of life of many of the mentally ill makes a mockery of the lofty predictions made by the advocates of shutting down mental institutions and transferring their function to community mental health centers, or CMHCs. Torrey writes: “The evidence is overwhelming that this federal experiment has failed, as seen most recently in the mass shootings by mentally ill individuals in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., and Tucson, Ariz. It is time for the federal government to get out of this business and return the responsibility, and funds, to the states.”

The strange case of Peter Navarro became curiouser and curiouser this week.

As the president’s pitchman for tariffs, Navarro was all over the airways this week with visions of new factories for steel and aluminum, all through the magical elixir of raising taxes on imports.

Maybe it will work. Maybe it won’t.

But if one of California’s most visible advocates of No Growth Environmentalism to stop jobs, housing, and growth of all kinds – and that is who Navarro was before he discovered the evils of China and Trump discovered him – can become the chief spokesman for more jobs, housing, and growth, then anything is possible.

Many Trump-supporters in San Diego are still amazed at how this leader of a liberal cabal of Southern California environmentalists rose so quickly to such great heights in Trump’s conservative regime. They still remember when Navarro arrived in San Diego in the 1980s and formed his no-growth group called PLAN: Prevent Los Angelization Now.

The idea was that building new homes creates the demand for new homes, and that would fill San Diego up with more people than anyone wants.

It’s an “if they don’t build it, they won’t come” kind of thing. As for the kids who grew up to want homes of their own, they would just have to go somewhere other than here.

Soon after Navarro’s plan was on the ballot, so was he, running for mayor of San Diego. Twice he tried. Twice he won the primary. Twice he lost the general election. After a similar defeat as a Democrat running for Congress, Navarro moved on, leaving San Diego to start writing books about the Chinese menace from his new post at the University of California, Irvine.