Remember Donald Trump waxing on his good friend Hannibal Lecter on the campaign trail? Made you think he was the one who needed to be in the insane asylum.
Now Trump wants to reopen actual insane asylums – not more psychiatric hospitals, treatment centers, not more money for mental health counseling, substance abuse prevention and treatment.
Insane asylums.
“Well, they used to have them, and you never saw people like we had, you know, they used to have them,” Trump said, answering a question from a tradwife wannabe from the Daily Caller, Reagan Reese.
“What happened is states like New York and California that had them, New York had a lot of them. They released them all into society because they couldn’t afford it. You know, it’s massively expensive,” Trump said.
True story there – the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1980s, on the watch of another Reagan, Ronald Reagan, emptied mental hospitals entirely because the Reaganites needed to cut government spending to pay for the Reagan tax cuts.
Sound familiar?
Trump, predictably, blamed the closures of New York facilities like the infamous Creedmoor and Bellevue on the Democratic governor in the Empire State in the 1980s, Mario Cuomo.
“They were closed by a certain governor, and I remember when they did, it was a long time ago, and I said, they didn’t release these people? And they did. They released them into society, and that’s what you have. It’s a rough, it’s a rough situation,” Trump said.
Cutting trillions from Medicare and Medicaid won’t do much to help the current issues with deficiencies in the provision of mental healthcare in the U.S., but anyway, Trump loves him some asylums.
Note, though, that he’s talking specifically about asylums, where society, for decades, sent people with mental health issues to go away, so that the rest of us didn’t have to be bothered with them, and not more modern mental healthcare, which treats people with mental health issues as, first and foremost, people.
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Chris Graham
