President Donald Trump told The Daily Caller that he is open to bringing back insane asylums to institutionalize mentally ill individuals living on America’s streets.
Trump sat down with Daily Caller White House Correspondent Reagan Reese on Friday for an exclusive, hour-long interview in the Oval Office.
The president spoke at length about his ongoing efforts to clean up the streets of Washington, D.C.
During the exchange, Trump said he was willing to consider reopening insane asylums to deal with the growing crisis.
“Yeah I would,” Trump responded when asked directly about reopening the facilities.
“Well, they used to have them, and you never saw people like we had, you know, they used to have them,” he explained.
Trump pointed to his home state of New York as an example of what went wrong when most asylums closed.
“And 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 told the outlet.
“But we had, they were all over New York. I remember when I was growing up, Creedmoor. They had a place, Creedmoor, they had a lot of them, Bellevue, and they were closed by a certain governor,” Trump recalled.
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“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,” he said.
Trump concluded that leaving severely mentally ill people untreated and on the streets of American cities puts everyone at risk.
“Because, you can’t have these people walking around,” he said.
“So dangerous, so dangerous. And they can live to be 85 years old,” Trump added.
The interview also touched on his crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital. Trump currently has the National Guard mobilized in D.C.
He has not ruled out sending federal help to other crime-plagued cities such as Chicago.
The question of reopening asylums comes against the backdrop of decades of “deinstitutionalization.”
According to Psychiatry Online, in 1955, half of all hospital beds in the country were for psychiatric patients.
Public institutions housed tens of thousands of patients, but the cost to operate them played a role in the closure of many of the facilities.
Trump’s 2024 campaign website stated of the issue, “President Trump will bring back mental institutions to house and rehabilitate those who are severely mentally ill or dangerously deranged with the goal of reintegrating them back into society.”
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