Over the past few days, the President has been disparaging the city of Baltimore, Maryland as part of his racist and insulting attacks against East Baltimore’s Congressional Representative, Rep. Elijah Cummings.
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“Rat-infested” and “disgusting” are just a few of the terms that the president has used to try to blame Cummings for the issues facing the city of Baltimore — issues that face nearly every major American city, including Trump’s home of New York, and issues that he as President is in much more of a position to fix than a Congressional representative.
His remarks have provoked widespread condemnation from all walks of American life, but one of the strongest condemnations came from the Editorial Board of the Baltimore Sun, which went right for the jugular with a scathing op-ed entitled “Better to have a few rats than to be one.”
Getting right to business, the Sun’s board laid out what’s really going on here in stark fashion — which is the use of racism to rile up his baying fans and defend the appalling conditions in his border concentration camps:
“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. President 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…'”
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In their defense of their city, the board pointed out some of the wonderful things in the 7th District that Trump failed to mention, like Fort McHenry and John Hopkins Hospital, and they were frankly surprised that those were the only racist dog-whistle he pulled out of his hood.
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. It was only surprising that there wasn’t room for a few classic phrases like “you people” or “welfare queens” or “crime-ridden ghettos” or a suggestion that the congressman “go back” to where he came from.
“…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.”
