Trump Slams Gavin Newsom over Homelessness in Christmas Tweet

President Donald Trump slammed California Governor Gavin Newsom in a Christmas Day tweet for doing “a really bad job of taking care of the homeless population in California.”

The president, evidently catching up on recent tweets, reacted Wednesday to several posts from late last week. One of them was from conservative commentator Tomi Lauren, reacting to a spin room interview at the Democrat debate in which Newsom bashed Trump over housing policy.

Breitbart News also asked Newsom about homelessness, as well as the new problem of power outages that is changing the way Californians mange their lives. New statistics released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development showed that California’s 16.4% increase in homeless was “entirely” responsible for the nation’s overall increase of 2.7% by early 2019.

Newsom told Breitbart News: “It is an embarrassment, it is unacceptable. And we’ve got to own it, we’ve got to own up and solve it.”

Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart News

However, Newsom and other Democrats in California insist the solution is more federal money for housing.

Experts argue that while housing may help, many homeless people are mentally ill or addicted to drugs, and other forms of intervention are needed, especially as some actually resist moving into permanent housing.

The Trump administration has been preparing contingency plans to invoke federal emergency powers and intervene in California’s homeless problem, perhaps by relocating homeless people to treatment centers on federal property.

Newsom did not respond to Trump’s tweet on Wednesday. He posted a tweet with photos of his family instead.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.