Charm City, charmless POTUS
Friday morning, the man who currently occupies the presidency noted with glee that a political rival who lives in Baltimore had been robbed. Thursday night at a rally in Ohio, he delighted in telling the crowd how many people die violently in Charm City each year.
These spasms came about a week after he vented that the city is unfit for human habitation, and that Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat who has represented much of Baltimore in Congress for 23 years, is to blame.
Baltimore is troubled. It is racked by far more than its share of drugs and violence, hopelessness and vermin and blight. This is the fault of many people and forces, chief among them the people who commit crimes and inept or corrupt local leaders. Anyone smart and honest would acknowledge that America’s complex racial history and economic abandonment and the war on drugs and easy access to guns have played parts too, as have failed federal attempts to fix urban problems, some of them pushed by Democrats.
For the most powerful man in government, who sets the tone for all others, to
reduce it all to a primal scream in order to gloat over a congressman falling victim to tragedies that frequently bedevil his city, tragedies that leave some Americans dead and other Americans devastated, is simply disgusting.
And exposes two huge hypocrisies. One, no politician could ever get away with pressing for political advantage the fact that many predominantly white parts of middle America have been ruined by failing local economies and drug addiction and premature death.
For these Americans, President Trump expresses compassion. He blames immigrants, trade and other outside forces. He points no fingers at Republican members of Congress.
The racial double standard sears the skin, no matter what color it is.
Two, dozens of U.S. cities are in the midst of a renaissance, experiencing record low crime, producing jobs at a far more rapid clip than the nation and otherwise flourishing. Hold your breath waiting for the president to acknowledge their Democratic representatives’ and leaders’ contributions to those historic revivals and you too will end up dead.