Donald Trump withheld housing funds to perform cruelty.
The suspension order arrived on letterhead from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The ink was dry. The child in the tent in Skid Row was not dry. The morning had already wet the nylon. The funding line dead-ended in Washington on a Friday in June. The caseworker in the Los Angeles drop-in center set the telephone back in the cradle. Outside, the concrete at Seventh and Main was already heating. Seventy-two thousand three hundred and eight bodies waited for a bed the letter in Scott Turner’s hand had deleted.
The letter named an investigation. The investigation named fraud. The fraud had already been corrected, the agency said, or was in the process of being corrected. The suspension notice did not pause. The suspension notice moved through the federal payment system at the speed the federal payment system makes available to things a secretary calls “corrupt failure.” The suspension notice reached the agency before the tent dried. The child in the tent was twelve. The mother in the tent was forty-two and sleeping on the ground. The federal funds suspended had been paying for the caseworker, the hotel voucher, and the lock on the door that the mother did not have.
You signed the order on Friday, June 12, and told Scott Turner to read the letter aloud. You knew a federal court had already ruled your broader funding scheme unlawful, but you tested it anyway on a city that has outpaced the nation in reductions. The administration has spent months building a list of Democratic states whose grants it has held back or frozen. The suspension notice landed just as Los Angeles concluded its mayoral runoff—incumbent Karen Bass and progressive councilor Nithya Raman in a runoff that eliminated Trump favorite Spencer Pratt—a timing that shows the reflex to punish California Democrats wherever leverage is found. This week, the same pattern reached Los Angeles. The letter alleged conflict-of-interest violations, empty hotel rooms paid for with government funds, and missing housing-site documentation. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the largest continuum-of-care homeless-services agency in the country, said nearly all the issues had been corrected or were being corrected. The city had already redirected its own funds when the state tightened its strings. The mayor of the city and the supervisor of the county have spent months auditing the agency. They have found where the weeds were growing and they are pulling them. You bypassed them. This did not alter the suspension schedule. The suspension schedule respects no corrections.
Scott, you sat in the climate-controlled room and read the letter aloud. The camera light was on. You said the words “homeless industrial complex.” You let the syllables sit in the air like dry dust. The compound noun had a face in it: the caseworker’s face, the hotel night manager’s face, the face of the county supervisor who had already pulled $300 million from the agency. The compound noun also contained the mother’s face but not in the way the compound noun would ever admit. You did not cough. You swallowed the words whole.
Let us walk to the room you left empty. The hotel room on the ledger is a blank space. The ledger is clean. The room is empty because the voucher you cancelled went to a family of three sleeping under the overpass on Santa Fe Avenue. The father has compressed lumbar vertebrae from sleeping flat on concrete for nineteen nights. His spine is settling into a permanent angle. The mother’s stomach contracts with the dry heave of drinking from a plastic bottle that has been sitting in the sun all day. The heat is not abstract. The heat is the temperature of the asphalt at noon.
Picture your grandfather on Santa Fe Avenue, Donald. Put the grandfather in the tent. The canvas is thin. The Santa Ana winds blow dust through the mesh and into his nose. He coughs at night. Your diaphragm tightens against the rib cage. You feel the rib cage resisting the breath. The tightness is the tightness of the canvas wrapping the old man’s chest. You cannot loosen it. Your hand holds the press release. The hand is warm. The hand is steady. The hand does not tremble because it does not hold the weight of the tent.
Your throat has not closed once since you signed the suspension notice, Secretary. There is a scratch in your throat that you do not notice because the scratch belongs to the mother who has been breathing wet air for three days. Your chest does not ache in the morning unless you have slept poorly. The mother’s chest aches from the cough she has carried since February. The federal funds would have paid for the clinic visit, but the funds are suspended, and the chest does not stop aching because the funds did.
Your jaw tightens when you make a statement for the cameras, Secretary. The mother’s jaw tightens when she tries to sleep and the cold has entered the joint. You do not know that her jaw is tight. You cannot feel it. The suspension notice was designed to prevent you from feeling it. The not-feeling is the indictment.
You are not fixing anything. The performance is avarice dressed as fiscal principle. You are a small man holding a large lever. The lever is pulled to break the legs of the people at the bottom. The breaking is the news. The breaking is the victory. You ignored the local audits already pulling the weeds and called it fraud instead. You froze the eight percent of the budget keeping thousands housed, and you watched the drop from seventy-five thousand five hundred and eighteen down to seventy-two thousand three hundred and eight shudder to a halt.
Your daughter is not in the tent, Scott. Your daughter is in the bedroom at the end of the hall, and the door locks, and the window has glass. If you placed her in the tent you would feel what the mother feels after three days of rain. You would register in your own body what the suspension notice is doing to the body of a forty-two-year-old woman whose medication you have suspended, whose caseworker you have suspended, whose voucher you have suspended. You would feel the ache, the scratch, the cold in the joint. You would not be able to hold the morning coffee cup without your hand registering the cold that the mother’s hand registers on the wet nylon. You would not be able to make the statement. The statement depends on your not feeling it.
The same hand that signed the suspension notice will pick up the fork at dinner. The same hand will hold the cup. The same hand will touch your daughter’s hair at bedtime. There is a metallic taste under your tongue, Secretary, that you cannot wash out. It has been there since the notice went out. It will be there when you wake up.
The mother’s hand will be cold tonight. The child’s hand will be cold tonight. The nylon will be wet tonight. The tent will still be wet tonight. You will sleep in a bed with a door that locks. Your hand will not be cold. Your jaw will not ache. The suspension notice will still be in effect.
The ink dries on the letter. The bodies remain on the pavement. The demand is unanswerable still: do justice, love kindness, walk humbly. The suspension notice does none of these. It was signed by a man who had never walked the three blocks from the federal building to the tent city.
“For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in.”
Matthew 25:35
You looked at the stranger and you closed the ledger. The stranger is the man with the broken spine. The stranger is the woman with the dry throat. The stranger waits in the heat, and the heat does not stop when the cameras go dark.