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The Baltimore Sun’s Response to Trump Tweets

A guest post [1] today at Bearing Drift discusses the troubles of Baltimore City, brought to the nation’s attention after the President of the United States sent out a series of tweets critical of the inner city’s issues as well as its Democratic U.S. Representative.

The unprecedented personal attacks from the occupant of the Republican-occupied White House resulted in a retort from the Baltimore Sun’s editorial board that they titled, “Better to have a few rats than be one [2].” It begins:

In case anyone missed it, the president of the United States had some choice words [3] to describe Maryland’s 7th congressional district [4] on Saturday morning. Here are the key phrases: “no human being would want to live there,” it is a “very dangerous & filthy place,” “Worst in the USA” and, our personal favorite: It is a “rat and rodent infested mess.”

He wasn’t really speaking of the 7th as a whole. He failed to mention Ellicott City, for example, or Baldwin or Monkton or Prettyboy, all of which are contained in the sprawling yet oddly-shaped district that runs from western Howard County to southern Harford County. No, Donald Trump’s wrath was directed at Baltimore and specifically at Rep. Elijah Cummings, the 68-year-old son of a former South Carolina sharecropper who has represented the district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1996.

It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. The congressman has been a thorn in this president’s side, and Mr. 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. President Trump bad-mouthed Baltimore in order to make a point that the border camps are “clean, efficient & well run,” which, of course, they are not — unless you are fine with all the overcrowding, squalor, cages and deprivation to be found in what the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector-general recently called “a ticking time bomb.”

In pointing to the 7th, the president wasn’t hoping his supporters would recognize landmarks like Johns Hopkins Hospital, perhaps the nation’s leading medical center. He wasn’t conjuring images of the U.S. Social Security Administration, where they write the checks that so many retired and disabled Americans depend upon. It wasn’t about the beauty of the Inner Harbor or the proud history of Fort McHenry. And it surely wasn’t about the economic standing of a district where the median income is actually above the national average.

Continuing by calling attention to what provoked the president to hit Twitter, the editorial board wrapped up with a reminder:

… we 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. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity.

In closing out the scathing editorial, the Sun’s editors finished with the line heard ’round the world:

Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.

For all the problems that plague parts of Baltimore, no one can blame its residents for defending their turf. The Sun did just that and, in turn, fired up community pride as #WeAreBaltimore trended on Twitter.

Read the entire Baltimore Sun editorial here [2].