Newspaper responds to president’s attack
Paper turns president’s line on rats back on him
The Baltimore Sun has rebuked President Donald Trump for his harsh remarks aimed at U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings and his district.
The Baltimore Sun responded on Saturday to President Donald Trump’s labeling of its hometown as a “rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live” in a scathing editorial titled, “Better to have a few rats than to be one.”
Earlier Saturday, Trump went after Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., in a series of tweets for the veteran congressman’s criticisms of the administration’s treatment of migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump called Cummings a “brutal bully” and said the conditions in his legislative district, which includes much of Baltimore city, are “FAR WORSE and more dangerous” than the those on the southern border.
Misspelling the lawmaker’s name, Trump said, “Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”
“No human being would want to live there,” he added.
In an editorial that ran in the paper’s Sunday print edition, the Sun responded to the president by calling him, “the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are ‘good people’ among murderous neo-Nazis.”
The Sun said Trump is “still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.”
Cummings has been a fierce critic of Trump and, as the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, is leading several investigations into the president and his administration. But the paper said Trump wasn’t only attacking Cummings because he “has been a thorn in the president’s side.”
“He was returning to an old standby of attacking an African American lawmaker from a majority black district on the most emotional and bigoted of arguments,” the Sun’s editorial board said. “It was only surprising that there wasn’t room for a few classic phrases like ‘you people’ or ‘welfare queens’ or ‘crimeridden ghettos’ or a suggestion that the congressman ‘go back’ to where he came from.”
Earlier this month, Trump sparked outrage when he told four Democratic congresswomen, all of them U.S. citizens who belong to ethnic minorities, to “go back” and fix their “crime infested” countries of origin before trying to legislate change in the U.S. His remarks were condemned as racist in a House resolution.
The Sun editorial said, “Trump sees attacking African American members of Congress as good politics, as it both warms the cockles of the white supremacists who love him and causes so many of the thoughtful people who don’t to scream.”