Jesse Jackson’s take on Trump from Tenderloin shelter
The 75-year-old reverend and leader of the civil rights movement by and large kept a straight face as President Trump softened his tone and promised to follow through on a number of proposals: removing two federal regulations for every one added, overhauling the Affordable Care Act and cracking down on undocumented immigrants.
To Jackson, watching inside the Hamilton Families shelter on Golden Gate Avenue in the Tenderloin — which provides families with medium-term housing and other resources — Trump’s remarks were mostly more of the same.
Speaking over the cries of a handful of children, crunching a foot over the crumbs of dropped snacks and abandoned juice boxes, Jackson repeatedly denounced the president’s proposal to increase military spending by $54 billion and cut funding from other federal programs to pay for it.
“Well, it was full of loaded one-liners but I still didn’t (hear) a plan to finance affordable health care, a plan to reduce the cost of public education, a plan to build affordable housing and a plan to lift up the poor,” said Jackson, a Baptist minister and two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1980s, who was a driving force of the civil rights movement and worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr.
During the speech, as more than a dozen people clustered inside a children’s play room at the center, a resident and mother of three, Yolunda Reed, 36, said she was more struck by what Trump didn’t say than what he did.
Ashley Moten, 29, said Trump’s promise to bring “law and order” to the border could help cut down on drugs, crime and gangs.
[...] she took some solace in Trump’s calls to increase infrastructure spending and add more jobs in the process.
Jeff Kositsky, the former executive director of Hamilton Families and the current director of San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness, said at the center that Trump “talked a lot about tax cuts,” but not enough about fixing the “broken” housing market.