Rude Pundit. This is so obvious, I’m surprised that no one has made the point before this.

It’s an old story when it comes to urban real estate. The owner of a building with a bunch of rent-stabilized apartments wants to jack up the cost of the places to meet what has become an exploding market or he wants them gone so he can wreck the place because the real estate parcel is that valuable. But if an elderly couple who has lived there for decades doesn’t want to move out or if a family couldn’t find anything nearby that was close to the low rent they get to pay by law, what’s a landlord to do? It’s not a perfect place to live; still, it’s where a lot of people are comfortable and happy.

Now, you can start hitting them with harassing lawsuits and threats to evict them for minor or outright made-up lease violations. But if that doesn’t work? Then you gotta raise your game. You refuse to make repairs so that leaks and other things get out of control unless the tenants repair them. Hey, you didn’t cause that mold to grow up the walls. You do construction in a way that causes noise and dust and shaking walls and floors. You don’t do anything to get rid of any bugs or vermin. If you get really desperate, you can open up part of the building to the homeless, allowing them to stay there for free.

You’re not kicking them out. You’re just making it miserable for them to be there so that they want to get out. You’re doing it for the sake of hurting them, and you don’t care what happens, even if it costs you money to do it.

We don’t really have to imagine the above scenario because that’s exactly what Donald Trump did when he was a slumlord in the 1980s at the 100 Central Park South building he had just bought in 1981. Yeah, he wanted to tear it down to build another big, dumb tower, but the place was full with tenants who were quite happy to pay far below-market for their homes. And Trump knew the apartments were occupied, but he wanted them gone. So he made life hell for them.

Trump’s approach to the Affordable Care Act is essentially the same thing. He tried to just get rid of it, but the repeal effort failed, so now he’s dropping a family of rats into it.