Democratic congressman Elijah Cummings has called his own Baltimore community a “drug-infested area” in Congress in the past, proving his and allies’ condemnation of Trump’s similar comment to be hypocritical virtue-signaling.
Cummings comes from a “drug infested area” where kids grow up to be drug zombies (if they grow up at all) just 40 miles from Washington DC, the Maryland rep laments in a 1999 congressional hearing, a clip from which has been retweeted by President Donald Trump.
The president appears to have gotten the last laugh after he was slammed for calling Cummings’ district a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” in a series of tweets over the weekend. Congressional Democrats including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, and New York Rep Jerry Nadler piling on to denounce the “racist remarks” of their favorite punching bag.
Some Baltimore residents took offense to Trump’s comment that “no human being would want to live there” – including David Simon, author and creator of the hit TV show “the Wire,” which won awards and critical praise for its portrayal of Baltimore as a crime-infested “corrupt mess.”
#Resistance media even suggested Trump only used the term “infested” when talking about minority communities, pointing to similar comments he’d made about his four least-favorite congresswomen (telling them to go back to the “totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came”) and black congressman John Lewis (D-Georgia) (whose Atlanta district he called “crime infested” and “in horrible shape”).
Also on rt.com Not just Baltimore: American cities have a HUGE rat problemUnfortunately for the president’s critics, Baltimore actually is rodent-infested, so much so that a documentary film (called, imaginatively, “Rat Film”) has been made about it. A clip of former Baltimore mayor Catherine Pugh – a black Democrat – recoiling from the smell of dead rats has also resurfaced.
Baltimore also has problems with crime and corruption: in 2018, it had the highest homicide rate of large US cities, and Pugh resigned earlier this year after a financial scandal which saw the FBI and IRS raid her offices. An investigation into business deals related to a series of children’s books she authored is ongoing.
Trump, meanwhile, has been an equal-opportunity critic of “infestations,” drawing fire from local politicians for calling lily-white New Hampshire a “drug-infested den” in 2017.
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