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Trump Called ‘Racist’ for Slamming Baltimore ― Then Video Shows Black Mayor Agreeing With Him

By Pluralist / July 28, 2019

Liberals have rushed to condemn President Donald Trump as racist for tweeting this weekend that Baltimore is a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”

However, amid the outrage, a 2018 video has resurfaced of then-Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh making very similar comments. In a Fox 45 segment broadcast last September, Pugh, a black Democrat, tours an East Baltimore neighborhood with other city leaders.

“What the hell. We should just take all this shit down,” she can be heard saying of the surrounding slums. “Whoa, you can smell the rats. Whew, Jesus. Oh, my God, you can smell the dead animals.”

What little controversy Pugh’s comments caused at the time was largely local. Nobody suggested she was a racist.
She resigned this May over a different scandal.


Nor was Pugh exceptional among liberals in noting the fallen state of Baltimore, which has the highest murder rate of any American city.
In May, The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story headlined “The Tragedy of Baltimore,” which details how in the wake of the 2015 riots, the city descended into “nothing less than a failure of order and governance the likes of which few American cities have seen in years.”
As Trump’s campaign noted Sunday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent and Democratic presidential candidate, visited Baltimore during his first presidential run in 2015 and compared the city to a “Third World country.”

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Later Sunday, by contrast, Sanders defended Baltimore on CNN’s “State of the Union,” saying that Trump’s attacks on American cities are “unbelievable.”

Catherine Pugh gets a very different response than Trump

Still, Trump was quickly deemed a bigot after he on Saturday slammed Baltimore as rat-infested. The president’s two-day Twitter tirade came in response to Rep. Elijah Cummings, a black Maryland Democrat who represents much of the city, complaining at a July 18 congressional hearing about conditions at the U.S. southern border.
Trump alleged that conditions in Baltimore are “FAR WORSE and more dangerous,” and called it a very dangerous & filthy place.” Cummings, the 68-year-old chairman of the House Oversight Committee, tweeted back at Trump that he was doing the best he could to “fight for my constituents.”https://twitter.com/RepCummings/status/1155132215208161281?s=20

Soon thereafter, a number of leading Democrats, including several 2020 presidential candidates, came to Cummings’ defense.Current Baltimore Mayor Bernard C. Jack Young called Trump’s tweets “completely unacceptable.” He hailed Baltimore as a “vibrant American City” and Cummings a “patriot and a hero.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — a California Democrat whose father once represented Baltimore in Congress and, along with her brother, served as its mayor — also praised Cummings.

She added: “We all reject racist attacks against him and support his steadfast leadership.”

Meanwhile, the Maryland chapter of the NAACP called Trump’s tweets racist and called for him to be impeached.

“These latest tweets reaffirm the NAACP Maryland State Conference’s position echoing the call of the National NAACP that this president must be impeached,” NAACP MSC President Gerald Stansbury said in a statement. “A nation is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable citizens, and we are ashamed of his rhetoric. America deserves a president who lifts our cities up, not one who heaps trash talk on them.”

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Many in the media also framed Trump’s tweets as further proof of his racism. They pointed, among other things, to his July 14 suggestion on Twitter that four freshman Democratic congresswomen “of color” “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

Those tweets, too, were deemed racist, including by the targeted lawmakers. Last week, two of the women ― Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan ― were revealed to have years ago posted similar tweets suggesting that their political opponents be deported from the United States.

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Pluralist

Andrew Tobin is Pluralist’s Editor-in-chief.

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