Trump Doubled Down After Calling Baltimore a Place Where 'No Human Being Would Want to Live'

From Esquire

Just weeks after tweeting racist remarks directed at four congresswomen of color, Trump attacked another non-white House member—and also slammed his entire district. On Saturday, the president wrote that Maryland Representative Elijah Cummings was a "brutal bully," and condemned his district, which is majority black and includes around half of the city of Baltimore, as a "rat and rodent infested mess" where "no human being would want to live." Trump doubled down in a series of Sunday tweets, but Maryland’s largest daily newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, came to its city’s defense.

"It’s not hard to see what’s going on here," wrote the paper’s editorial board of Trump’s attack on Cummings. "The congressman has been a thorn in this president’s side, and Mr. Trump sees attacking African American members of Congress as good politics, as it both warms the cockles of the white supremacists who love him and causes so many of the thoughtful people who don’t to scream."

The paper also pointed out that, rather than turning any city’s struggles into racist insult-fodder, Trump’s duty as president is to work on behalf of all Americans. "The White House has far more power to effect change in this city, for good or ill, than any single member of Congress including Mr. Cummings," the editorial read. "If there are problems here, rodents included, they are as much his responsibility as anyone’s, perhaps more because he holds the most powerful office in the land."

"Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one," the editorial concluded.

The president, who’s called majority African-American neighborhoods "war zones" and black nations "shithole countries," rebutted the idea that his repeated condemnations of black communities might be at all racist. "The Democrats always play the Race Card, when in fact they have done so little for our Nation’s great African American people,” he tweeted Sunday. "Now, lowest unemployment in U.S. history, and only getting better. Elijah Cummings has failed badly!"

Then, as if to prove that he also slams majority-white communities, he criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district—though without any of the bile he mustered in his descriptions of Baltimore.

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