Baltimore Residents: Trump's Attacks on the City Are Rooted in "Racism and White Supremacy"

President Trump is facing widespread outrage after describing Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” in tweets attacking Congressmember Elijah Cummings, one of the most prominent African-American lawmakers in Washington. Trump tweeted that Cummings’s district is “considered the Worst in the USA,” and said “no human being would want to live there.” Trump’s initial tweets came after Fox News ran a story about Baltimore and after Cummings criticized the conditions of immigration jails along the Mexican border. Officials across Baltimore and Maryland denounced the president’s remarks, and The Baltimore Sun responded by publishing an editorial titled “Better to have a few rats than to be one.” We speak with Kaye Wise Whitehead, associate professor of communication and African and African American studies at Loyola University Maryland and host of a local radio show in Baltimore, and Dayvon Love, director of public policy for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump is facing widespread outrage after describing Baltimore as a, quote, “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” Trump made the remark in a tweet attacking Congressman Elijah Cummings, one of the most prominent African-American lawmakers in Washington. Trump tweeted Baltimore is, quote, “considered the Worst in the USA,” and “no human being would want to live there.” Cummings, who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, has represented Maryland’s 7th District, which includes parts of Baltimore, since 1996. Trump’s initial tweets came after Fox News ran a story about Baltimore and after Cummings criticized the conditions of immigration jails along the Mexican border.

Officials across Baltimore and Maryland denounced the president’s remarks. The Baltimore Sun responded by publishing an editorial headlined “Better to have a few rats than to be one.” On Saturday, CNN anchor Victor Blackwell discussed Trump’s comments about his hometown, Baltimore.

VICTOR BLACKWELL: “Infested.” That’s usually reserved for references to rodents and insects, but we’ve seen the president invoke infestation to criticize lawmakers before. You see a pattern here? Donald Trump has tweeted more than 43,000 times. He has insulted thousands of people, many different types of people. But when he tweets about “infestation,” it’s about black and brown people. … “Infested,” he says. The president says about Congressman Cummings’ district—

AMY GOODMAN: Blackwell then choked up.

VICTOR BLACKWELL: —that no human would want to live there. You know who did, Mr. President? I did, from the day I was brought home from the hospital to the day I left for college. And a lot of people I care about still do. There are challenges, no doubt, but people are proud of their community. I don’t want to sound self-righteous, but people get up and go to work there. They care for their families there. They love their children, who pledge allegiance to the flag just like people who live in districts of congressmen who support you, sir. They are Americans, too.

AMY GOODMAN: That was CNN anchor Victor Blackwell on air on Saturday.

Trump responded to the widespread criticism by accusing Congressmember Elijah Cummings of being racist, in a tweet Sunday. This all comes two weeks after Trump unleashed a racist attack on four progressive congresswomen of color, telling them to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.” The tweets were aimed at Congressmembers Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. All four are U.S. citizens, three of the four born in the United States.

We go now to Baltimore, where we’re joined by two guests. Kaye Wise Whitehead is an associate professor of communication and African and African American studies at Loyola University Maryland, host of a local radio show in Baltimore. And Dayvon Love is director of public policy for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Dayvon Love, let’s begin with you. Your response to this attack on Baltimore. “No human would want to live there,” President Trump said.

DAYVON LOVE: Well, one of the things I think is important in putting Trump’s tweets in perspective is that we live in a society structured on racism and white supremacy. And the things that Trump says in his tweets are actually—excuse me—widely held beliefs in the American collective consciousness, notions of black inferiority that span from things like black folks being inherently criminal, black folks being inherently intellectually inferior, black folks being inherently pathological. And so, you know—and the way that that shows up in our society is through popular narrations and representation of black people as pathological.

And so, what I think is important in terms of my own reaction to Trump’s tweets, it’s important to note that what he’s expressing is a societal belief, that he’s not exceptional in the sense that he believes it. Now, it may be it’s exceptional that he would express it in the way that he did, in such open fashion. But I think that the tweets itself, I think, are demonstrative of a societal belief that animates the institutions of civil society, that really create a circumstance where particularly black folks in the kinds of communities that he’s talking about experience a feeling of folks, both by way of policies and rhetoric, that don’t deem them as human beings. And so, he’s capitulating to a base that believes those things more overtly than the kind of subconscious belief that I think permeates all of American civil society.

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