Convicted felon Donald Trump gave a rambling press conference last week, stepping in for propaganda princess Karoline Leavitt. At one point in his incoherent rant, Trump launched into a reverie about reviving archaic "mental institutions" with "bars on the windows." I'm not kidding.
“I grew up in Queens, we had a place called Creedmoor [Psychiatric Center],” Trump said, “Creedmoor. Did anybody know that? Creedmoor. It was a big … I said, ‘Mom, why are those bars on the building?’ I used to play little league baseball there at a place called Cunningham Park. I was quite the baseball player, you wouldn't believe. But I said to my mother, ‘Mom,’ she would be there, always there for me. She said, ‘Son, you could be a professional baseball player.’ I said, ‘Thanks, mom.’ I said, ‘Why are those bars on the windows?’”
He went on to blame Democrats for the deinstitutionalization of the 1970s and 1980s, saying it caused many people to become homeless. The fact is the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, signed by former President Jimmy Carter, was designed to serve as a critical safety net for people who couldn’t obtain mental health services. The legislation was promptly defunded and effectively dismantled by former President Ronald Reagan.
But after blaming Democrats for the end of an older, more barbaric era in mental health care, Trump circled back to his childhood memories.
“It wasn't normal, you know?” he said. “You're used to looking at, like, a window. But this one you're looking at all the steel—vicious steel, tiny windows, bars all over the place. Nobody was getting out. It's called the mental institution. That was an insane asylum.” Huh?
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