President Donald Trump has lashed out at his critics and sought to deflect criticism of his incendiary tweets by labelling a leading black congressman as himself racist.
In the latest rhetorical shot, Mr Trump said his weekend comments referring to Representative Elijah Cummings’ majority-black Baltimore district as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live” were not racist.
He also lashed out at prominent civil rights campaigner the Reverend Al Sharpton.
Mr Trump tweeted: “If racist Elijah Cummings would focus more of his energy on helping the good people of his district, and Baltimore itself, perhaps progress could be made in fixing the mess.”
“His radical ‘oversight’ is a joke!”
After a weekend of attacks on Mr Cummings, the son of former sharecroppers who rose to become the powerful chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Mr Trump expanded his attacks to include a prominent Cummings defender, Mr Sharpton, who was travelling to Baltimore to hold a press conference in condemnation of the president.
“Al is a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score,” Mr Trump tweeted ahead of the press conference, adding that the civil rights activist and MSNBC host “Hates Whites & Cops!”
Mr Sharpton fired back at the president in a tweet of his own, saying: “I do make trouble for bigots.”
Mr Trump appeared to dig a deeper hole even as a top White House aide sought to dismiss the controversy by describing Trump’s comments as hyperbole.
Two weeks ago, Mr Trump caused a nationwide uproar with tweets directed at four Democratic congresswomen from ethnic minorities as he looked to stoke racial divisions for political gain heading into the 2020 election.
Crazy Bernie Sanders recently equated the City of Baltimore to a THIRD WORLD COUNTRY! Based on that statement, I assume that Bernie must now be labeled a Racist, just as a Republican would if he used that term and standard! The fact is, Baltimore can be brought back, maybe……
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2019
….even to new heights of success and glory, but not with King Elijah and that crew. When the leaders of Baltimore want to see the City rise again, I am in a very beautiful oval shaped office waiting for your call!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2019
Mr Trump noted that Democratic presidential contender and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders had “recently equated” parts of Baltimore to a “third world country” in 2015 comments.
“I assume that Bernie must now be labelled a racist, just as a Republican would if he used that term and standard,” Mr Trump tweeted on Monday.
Speaking in television interviews, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Mr Trump was reacting in frustration to the Democrats’ unrelenting investigations and talk of impeachment.
He said Mr Trump swung hard at Mr Cummings and his Baltimore district because he believes such Capitol Hill critics are neglecting serious problems back home in their zeal to unfairly undermine his presidency.
“I understand that everything that Donald Trump says is offensive to some people,” Mr Mulvaney said.
But he added: “The president is pushing back against what he sees as wrong. It’s how he’s done it in the past, and he’ll continue to do it in the future.”
Mr Mulvaney, a former congressman, said he understood why some people could perceive Mr Trump’s words as racist.
Mr Mulvaney said Mr Trump’s words were exaggerated for effect, “Does the president speak hyperbolically? Absolutely”, and meant to draw attention to Democratic-backed investigations of the Republican president and his team in Washington.
“Instead of helping people back home, they’re focusing on scandal in Washington DC, which is the exact opposite of what they said they would do when they ran for election in 2018,” Mr Mulvaney said, pointing at Democrats who now control the House.
He asserted that Mr Trump’s barbs were a reaction to what the president considered to be inaccurate statements by Mr Cummings about conditions in which children are being held in detention at the US-Mexico border.
At a hearing last week, Mr Cummings accused a top administration official of wrongly calling reports of filthy, overcrowded border facilities “unsubstantiated”.
“When the president hears lies like that, he’s going to fight back,” Mr Mulvaney said.
Mr Trump’s tweets Saturday also charged that Cummings’ district, which includes Johns Hopkins Hospital, the Social Security Administration and the national headquarters of the NAACP, is “considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States”.
Condemnation followed from Democrats over the weekend, including some of the party’s presidential candidates.
Statements from a spokesman for Maryland’s Republican governor and from the lieutenant governor defended Mr Cummings’ district and its people.
The president has tried to put racial polarisation at the centre of his appeal to his base of voters, tapping into anxieties about demographic and cultural changes.
Mr Mulvaney argued that Mr Trump would criticise any politician, no matter the person’s race, in a similar way if Trump felt that individual spoke unfairly about the president’s policies.
He volunteered that if Representative Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who leads the House Intelligence Committee, had made the same remarks as Mr Cummings, Mr Trump would have responded.
“It has zero to do with the fact that Adam is Jewish and everything to do with Adam would just be wrong if he were saying that,” Mr Mulvaney said.
“This is what the president does. He fights and he’s not wrong to do so.”
To Mr Mulvaney, Mr Trump was “right to raise” the challenges faced in Mr Cummings’ district at the same time that Mr Cummings and other Democrats are “chasing down” the Russia investigation undertaken by Robert Mueller and pursuing “this bizarre impeachment crusade.”
Mr Cummings is leading multiple investigations of the president’s governmental dealings.
In his direct response to Trump on Twitter, Mr Cummings said: “Mr President, I go home to my district daily.
“Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbours. It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch.
“But, it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.”
Mr Cummings has also drawn the president’s ire for investigations touching on his family members serving in the White House.
His committee voted along party lines Thursday to authorise subpoenas for personal emails and texts used for official business by top White House aides, including Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner.
Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro said Mr Trump was engaging in “racial priming.”
“Using this language and taking actions to try and get people to move into their camps by racial and ethnic identity.
“That’s how he thinks he won in 2016 and that’s how he thinks he’s going to win in 2020,” Mr Castro said.
Earlier this month, Mr Trump drew bipartisan condemnation following his call for Democratic Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan to get out of the US “right now”.
He said that if the politicians “hate our country,” they can go back to their “broken and crime-infested” countries.
All four politicians are American citizens and three of the four were born in the US.
The House later voted largely along party lines to condemn his “racist comments”.
“Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one” Baltimore Sun responds to Trump click here
