Trump Open to Bringing Back Insane Asylums

President Donald Trump says he is open to the idea of bringing back insane asylums.  

During an interview in the Oval Office Friday with Daily Caller White House Correspondent Reagan Reese, Trump was asked if he would consider reopening insane asylums for those suffering from severe mental illness.  

“Yeah, I would,” Trump responded, adding, “They used to have them, and you never saw people like we had, you know, they used to have them.”  

Trump said he remembers seeing insane asylums in New York but then the residents of those facilities were released “into society because they couldn’t afford it.”  

Insane asylums, or mental hospitals, grew in New York and across the U.S. from the early 1900s to 1950. In the 1950s, care for the mentally ill began to shift away from inpatient care to outpatient treatment in a move known as “deinstitutionalization,” according to the Manhattan Institute.  

Trump says he remembers when the facilities began to close in New York, adding that they released the people onto the streets in what he termed “a rough situation.” 

During Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s tenure from 2011-2021, Cuomo worked to reduce the number of people living in state psychiatric centers under an initiative known as the “Transformation Plan.” The Manhattan Institute found that while the number of people staying at state psychiatric centers on a daily basis fell by 12% from 2014-2018, the number of mentally ill homeless in the city grew by about 22% from 2015-2017.  

About 67 out of every 100 homeless people suffer from a mental health disorder, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.  

Trump’s comments regarding insane asylums come as the president is focused on tackling high crime rates across the nation. Trump has federalized the police in Washington, D.C., and deployed the National Guard to crack down on crime. Trump has now declared the district a “crime-free zone.”  

Trump, in a Truth Social post on Monday, praised Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser for working with his administration to bring “CRIME down to virtually NOTHING in D.C.,” but bashed other Democrat politicians.  

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “spend all of their time trying to justify violent Crime, instead of working with us to completely ELIMINATE it,” Trump said.  

Multiple reports indicate violent crime has fallen in the nation’s capital since Aug. 11 when Trump federalized the city’s Metropolitan Police Department.