On Trump’s Baltimore mention

Anyone with the fortitude to endure President Donald Trump’s wearisome campaign rally Saturday (June 20) in Tulsa might have caught a passing reference to Baltimore. Was it regarding the city’s improving coronavirus numbers? Its more peaceful approach to Black Lives Matter protests? Was it about the 64th anniversary of the integration of the city’s public pools on June 23? You know better than that. President Trump regards Baltimore “as flies to wanton boys,” as the Bard might observe, meaning with both disdain and callous indifference.

The reference was to the city’s homicide rate comparing it to that of El Salvador, Guatemala and

Afghanistan. And it was purely to make a point about Democratic leadership. He made no mention — as he spoke the day after Juneteenth and not far from the site of the worst massacre of African Americans in U.S. history — of the awful legacies at work in Baltimore and other cities, ranging from racial discrimination to the failed drug war to concentrated poverty, and on and on. Mr. Trump isn’t about fixing inequities; he’s about exploiting them.

Given that the president also mentioned Baltimore just four days earlier to decry the police department’s failure to solve 68 percent of homicides last year and last year’s attacks on the city’s litter and rodent population, it’s clear that he sees attacking Charm City as being in his political interest. (AP)