In case anyone missed it, the president of the United States had some choice words to describe Maryland's Seventh Congressional District on Saturday morning. Here are the key phrases: "no human would want to live there," it is a "very dangerous & filthy place," "Worst in the USA" and, our personal favorite: It is a "rat and rodent infested mess." He wasn't really speaking of the district as a whole.
No, Donald Trump's wrath was directed at Baltimore and specifically at Rep. Elijah Cummings, the 68-year-old son of a former South Carolina sharecropper who has represented the district in the U.S. House since 1996.
It's not hard to see what's going on here. The congressman has been a thorn in this president's side, and 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. Trump bad-mouthed Baltimore in order to make a point that the border camps are "clean, efficient & well run," which, of course, they are not — unless you are fine with all the overcrowding, squalor, cages and deprivation to be found in what the Department of Homeland Security's own inspector-general recently called "a ticking time bomb."
In pointing to the Seventh, the president wasn't hoping his supporters would recognize landmarks like Johns Hopkins Hospital, perhaps the nation's leading medical center. He wasn't conjuring images of the U.S. Social Security Administration, where they write the checks that so many retired and disabled Americans depend upon. It wasn't about the beauty of the Inner Harbor or the proud history of Fort McHenry. And it surely wasn't about the economic standing of a district where the median income is actually above the national average. No, he was returning to an old standby of attacking an African-American lawmaker from a majority black district on the most emotional and bigoted of arguments.
This is a president who will happily debase himself at the slightest provocation. And given Cummings' criticisms of U.S. border policy, the various investigations he has launched as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, his willingness to call Trump a racist for his recent attacks on the freshmen congresswomen, and the fact that "Fox & Friends" had recently aired a segment critical of the city, slamming Baltimore must have been irresistible in a Pavlovian way. Fox News rang the bell, the president salivated and his thumbs moved across his cellphone into action.
Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman's name correctly (it's Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women's private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are "good people" among murderous neo-Nazis that he's still not fooling most Americans into believing he's even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.
FROM AN EDITORIAL IN THE BALTIMORE SUN
