Mulvaney downplays tweets
Downplays tweets at Baltimore, Rep. Cummings of Md.
The acting chief of staff defends Trump after his Twitter attacks on Rep. Cummings, Baltimore.
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Sunday defended President Donald Trump’s attacks on the city of Baltimore and Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., saying that some people will be offended by anything the president says.
One day earlier, Trump had tweeted that Cummings’s district is a “rodentinfested mess” where “no human being would want to live.”
“Do you understand that that is offensive to the Americans who do live there?” host Margaret Brennan asked on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
“I understand that everything that Donald Trump says is offensive to some people,” Mulvaney replied.
Brennan continued to press him, repeating Trump’s statement that “no people would want to live there.”
“This is being perceived as racist. Do you understand why?” she asked.
“I understand why, but that doesn’t mean that it’s racist,” Mulvaney responded. “The president is pushing back against what he sees as wrong. It’s how he’s done it in the past, and he’ll continue to do it in the future.”
On “Fox News Sunday,” Mulvaney argued that it was “fair to have that conversation” about the conditions in Cummings’s district.
“Have you seen some of the pictures on the internet, just this morning, of the conditions in Baltimore, Maryland? ... The richest state in the nation has abject poverty like that — a state, by the way, dominated for generations by Democrats,” Mulvaney said.
Before entering the Trump administration in 2017, Mulvaney represented South Carolina’s 5th District in Congress. The district had a median income of $44,685 in 2018 — lower than the $56,350 median income of Maryland’s 7th District, which Cummings represents.
In a tweet after returning to the White House from his Virginia golf club late Sunday afternoon, Trump said there was “nothing racist” about “stating plainly what most people already know.”
Cummings, he added, “has done a terrible job for the people of his district, and of Baltimore itself. Dems always play the race card when they are unable
to win with facts. Shame!”
He later tweeted that Cummings is “racist” and that “his radical ‘oversight’ is a joke!”
As chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Cummings has initiated most of the investigations into the Trump administration’s operations and policies, including over reports of inhumane treatment at migrant detention centers.
Marylanders and those in Baltimore did not take kindly to Trump’s characterizations.
The paper of the city that Trump attacked didn’t mince words.
“Better to have a few rats than to be one,” the Baltimore Sun’s editorial declared in its headline. The Sun is a Tribune Publishing newspaper.
On Saturday evening, the editorial board of a paper that has been a city fixture since 1837 joined the wave of Maryland residents and leaders condemning Trump. The scathing piece, which drew responses across the world, highlights Baltimore’s strengths and accuses Trump of deploying “the most emotional and bigoted of arguments” against a Democratic African American congressman from a majority-black district.
“We regularly mock some of the things (Trump) does, but I think to call the president of the United States a rat or a vermin ... that’s a new place to go,” Sun editorial writer Peter Jensen, who rushed to the office on his day off to write the piece, told The Washington Post. “But my gut
instinct as I was writing the editorial was that that was the inescapable conclusion.”
The Sun went on to point out aspects of the 7th District that Trump had neglected to mention: the above-average median income, the presence of both the renowned Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Social Security Administration, which helps the retired and disabled.
But the paper saved perhaps its strongest language for the piece’s ending, turning to Trump’s own record.
The editorial board “would tell 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 that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post,” the Sun said.
This latest Twitter The episode marks the second time in two weeks that Trump’s statements about a minority lawmaker have sparked outrage. This month, he tweeted that four minority congresswomen should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Days later, after Trump criticized one of the women, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., a crowd at a rally in North Carolina responded by chanting, “Send her back! Send her back!”
All four of the congresswomen are U.S. citizens. Three of the four were born in the United States; Omar was born in Somalia and became a U.S. citizen as a teenager.
Cummings responded to Trump on Saturday, defending his dedication to his constituents.
“Mr. President, I go home to my district daily. Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors,” he tweeted. “It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch. But, it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.”
Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, declined to criticize Trump over his attacks on Cummings.
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., avoided stating his opinions about the tweets on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” pivoting away from questions on Trump and racism and toward Cummings’s statements on Border Patrol agents — criticizing the congressman for those remarks.