By Ros Krasny / Bloomberg News (TNS)
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump picked up where he left off with Twitter posts early Sunday morning attacking a prominent black lawmaker, Elijah Cummings, for a second day. He also rebuffed suggestions from Democrats and others that his comments had been racist.
“Elijah Cummings has failed badly!” Trump said of the House Oversight Committee chair, about seven hours after his final tweet along the same lines late Saturday night.
Cummings, 68, has recently criticized Trump’s policies on the U.S.-Mexico border, calling the treatment of migrant children at detention facilities there “government sponsored child abuse,” and clashed with Trump’s acting Homeland Security chief.
Trump doubled down after Democrats called his tweets racist, applying the same “failing badly” theme to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after she and other lawmakers came to Cummings’s defense.
Trump pivoted from Cummings’s district, which he’d branded “a disgusting, rat and rodent infected mess,” to the wealthy San Francisco area that Pelosi represents in Congress.
Pelosi’s district is “not even recognizeable (sic) lately,” Trump said.
While Trump blamed Cummings for conditions in Baltimore, he promised in his 2016 speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination, and his 2017 inaugural address, that he would fix poverty in inner cities, along with crime and drug problems.
BALTIMORE PROMISES
“Every action I take I will ask myself, does this make better for young Americans in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Detroit, in Ferguson, who have really, in every way, folks, the same right to live out their dreams as any other child in America, any other child,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention in July 2016.
Cummings, a regular critic of Trump, this month called the treatment of migrant children at detention facilities on the U.S.-Mexico border “government sponsored child abuse.” Pelosi, a Baltimore native, defended Cummings as a champion “for civil rights and economic justice, a beloved leader in Baltimore, and deeply valued colleague.”
Maryland’s 7th Congressional District includes about half of Baltimore, including most of the majority-black precincts, and parts of adjacent Howard and Baltimore counties, including a mix of urban, suburban and rural areas. The district is about 36% white, 55% black and 4.9% Asian, according to Census data.
Conditions in Cummings’ district are “FAR WORSE and more dangerous” than those at the southern border, which “is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded,” Trump said. The president also implied, without offering evidence, that corruption was rife in the district, suggesting federal money sent there is “stolen.”
Cummings has served in Congress since 1996 and is chairman of the House Oversight Committee. He was re-elected in 2018 with 76% of the vote.
Following the tweets, and Trump’s suggestion that he spends little time in Baltimore, Cummings tweeted that “I go home to my district daily. Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors.”
At an oversight panel hearing on July 18 Cummings became emotional as he asked acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan about conditions for migrants held in border facilities.
“You feel like you’re doing a great job, right?” Cummings asked McAleenan. “What does that mean? When a child is sitting in their own feces, can’t take a shower?” he continued. “Come on man. What’s that about? None of us would have our children in that position. They are human beings.”
FOX TRIGGER
Less than an hour before the tweets on Saturday, Fox & Friends, a morning television show the president is known to watch, aired a segment on Cummings and his Congressional district.
There could be a more personal component, though: the House Oversight Committee this week authorized Cummings to subpoena work-related emails and texts sent by White House officials, including Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, on their personal accounts.
A subsidiary of Kushner’s family real estate business, JK2 Westminster, owns thousands of rental apartments and townhouses in the Baltimore area, the New York Times reported in 2017. None of the housing complexes are in Cummings’s district but several are close enough to share a ZIP code.
While Trump has been critical of many Democrats and others, some of his harshest comments have been aimed at minority lawmakers. That includes the so-called Squad of four first-term female congresswomen, and Rep. Maxine Waters of California, whom the president has repeatedly called “low IQ” on Twitter and in campaign rallies.
The president’s recent unrelenting attacks on the four freshmen lawmakers — all American women of color — is part of a bet that he can stoke his base of die-hard Republican supporters. Yet it risks deepening accusations that he is racist and turning off more moderate voters.
The Baltimore Sun newspaper on Saturday penned a blistering editorial following Trump’s tweets, concluding, “better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.” The Twitter hashtag #WeAreBaltimore has been trending.
Also on Saturday, returning from several hours at one of his golf courses, Trump said without elaboration that “consideration is being given to declaring ANTIFA” as a “major Organization of Terror.”
Antifa, short for anti-fascist, is a loosely-bound movement of left-wing activists opposed, at times militantly, to far-right ideology.
They have been criticized by both sides of the political spectrum for acts of violence, such as the beating of a political commentator or vandalism the night of Trump’s inauguration. Yet there’s little evidence of a major uptick in left-wing violence.
At least two Republican senators, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Ted Cruz of Texas, have proposed a nonbinding resolution that would label antifascists as “domestic terrorists.” The resolution wouldn’t change U.S. law.
— With assistance from Mark Niquette.
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