Donald Trump said he might “intercede” to “clean up” homelessness in San Francisco and Los Angeles, noting that world leaders “can’t be looking at that”.

In a conversation with the Fox News host Tucker Carlson broadcast Monday evening, Trump called the situation “disgraceful” and implied that it was making police officers unwell.

“I’m looking at it very seriously,” Trump said of homelessness, according to a Fox News summary of the Carlson interview. “They can’t be looking at scenes like you see in Los Angeles and San Francisco,” Trump said, referring to world leaders. “We’re looking at it very seriously. We may intercede,” he added.

“You can’t have what’s happening – where police officers are getting sick just by walking the beat,” the president continued. “I mean, they’re getting actually very sick, where people are getting sick, where the people living there living in hell, too.”

The president may have been referring to a report from last month, where a police officer in Los Angeles was diagnosed with typhoid fever, potentially in connection with work in an area downtown with a large homeless population.

In his interview with Carlson, who recently traveled with the president to the Korean peninsula, Trump said that homelessness could “ruin” American cities. Discussing unsanitary conditions in cities, he described a “phenomenon that started two years ago”, although it was unclear what specifically he was referring to.

In a rambling summary, he opined on a multitude of factors in the crisis: “Some of them have mental problems where they don’t even know they’re living that way. In fact, perhaps they like living that way … We cannot ruin our cities. And you have people that work in those cities. They work in office buildings and to get into the building, they have to walk through a scene that nobody would have believed possible three years ago.”

Los Angeles has experienced a 16% increase in the homeless population over the last year, the latest sign of severe income inequality and a worsening housing crisis. San Francisco saw a 17% increase since its last count, a severe surge amid an IPO boom in the tech industry.

The president railed against some of those big tech companies in the interview on Monday, echoing, without clear evidence, a conservative claim of bias in the industry. “Facebook was against me. They were all against me. Twitter was against me,” Trump said.

A growing wealth gap and a failure to enact public policy that would provide a basic social net of healthcare, counseling, and other services to the neediest citizens has exacerbated the homelessness crisis, policy analysts say.

The first two and a half years of the Trump administration have yielded few traces of action on the social policy front, apart from a criminal justice reform bill. Trump has repeatedly attacked society’s most vulnerable, including immigrants and refugees. Yet in his interview with Carlson, Trump appeared enthused about his plan to address homelessness.

“When we have leaders of the world coming in to see the president of the United States and they’re riding down a highway, they can’t be looking at that,” Trump said of homelessness. “I really believe that it hurts our country.”