Trump continues to bash Baltimore as Twitter strategy
In case you missed it, amid all the crises facing the country these days, President Donald Trump was on Twitter again over the weekend lavishly praising Kimberly Klacik, Republican candidate for Maryland’s 7th Congressional District, while bashing Baltimore, which is part of it.
A string of tweets from the president Sunday began, “Be smart Baltimore! You have been ripped off for years by Democrats & gotten nothing but poverty & crime. It will only get worse UNLESS YOU ELECT KIMBERLY KLACIK TO CONGRESS … ”
The tweets go on to say, “Baltimore is WORST IN NATION, Kimberly will fix it and fast … As I have often said, Baltimore is last in everything. WHAT THE HELL DO YOU HAVE TO LOSE?”
Look at the bright side: At least he laid off the rats this time.
But there is a history and media strategy here that hasn’t been fully understood despite all that has been written and said about Ms. Klacik since a video of her walking through trash-strewn streets of Baltimore went viral last month with a lot of help from the president. Ms. Klacik has been treated in some quarters as if she is a rising political and media star who bears close watching as part of the future of the Republican Party. Maybe. But it looks to me like she is just the latest front person for Team Trump’s belief that some Black voters can be won over by trashing the cities in which they live and blaming it on Democratic leadership.
Mr. Trump seems perfectly happy to make the pitch himself as he did in Michigan on the campaign trail in 2016.
“What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump?” he said at a rally in August of that year. “You’re living in poverty. Your schools are no good. You have no jobs. Fifty-eight percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”
But it is better if he can have a Black surrogate saying it for him.
“President Trump’s ‘ criticism’ is accurate,” Ms. Klacik wrote in an email response to questions from me. “No one has yet to dispute his claims.”
Her role, she wrote, is simple: “I’m running for office discussing what so many have swept under the rug for decades, including [The] Baltimore Sun. Billions in federal funds are sent to Baltimore annually, a journalist could take on the investigation … just a thought for your colleagues.”
The billions sent to Baltimore is an old talking point of the president’s. In July of last year, he claimed that billions of federal dollars have been “wasted” in the city, without elaborating or offering evidence. It appears Ms. Klacik has now taken up the baton.
She’s not the first to carry water for the president.
In August 2019 as the furor over Mr. Trump’s tweets attacking Baltimore as a rat infested hellhole had quieted down, I wrote about a right-wing, anti-Baltimore media campaign that was still alive and well on YouTube and Facebook. It involved ads attacking Baltimore as, you guessed it, a rat infested hellhole. The cause of the misery in Baltimore, according to the videos: decades of Democratic leadership. The ads fiercely attacked Rep. Elijah Cummings, who until he died last year represented the 7th District.
One of the ads I critiqued in that 2019 social media campaign was much like the one Ms. Klacik gained so much attention with last month.
The 2019 ad is headlined: “BLACK CONSERVATIVE HAS BRUTAL MESSAGE FOR RAT-INFESTED BALTIMORE.”
The Black conservative is Rob Smith, who was described online at Turning Point USA, the right-wing platform that produced the ad, as a “veteran and conservative warrior that’s fought for freedom.” In the ad, Mr. Smith stands in a field of overgrown weeds behind a row of three abandoned buildings with broken and missing windows and passionately addresses the camera.
“You can’t keep telling people it is racist to criticize the people whose policies created all this,” Smith says. “This is Baltimore. Baltimore is over 60% Black. Baltimore’s mayor is Black. Baltimore’s last mayor is Black. The mayor before that was Black. The elected officials were Black. Baltimore has a poverty rate of over two times the state average of Maryland. Baltimore has trash in the streets. Baltimore has dilapidated homes. Baltimore has African-Americans who don’t feel safe …”
The gender of the speaker is different. And Mr. Smith is standing instead of walking through a scenario of urban blight as Ms. Klacik does, but they are singing from the same hymn book. Ms. Klacik’s video is just a continuation of a Team Trump strategy used in 2016 and repeated last year by its allies in the early stages of the 2020 race.
The headline on my 2019 column about ads like the one featuring Mr. Smith: “Trump-inspired attacks on Baltimore continue in Facebook ads. We could be watching this all the way through 2020.”
Indeed, we are seeing it on the eve of the November election. Here’s hoping it ends there and we can have a more productive, honest and informed discussion about Baltimore, race and the future of urban America.