President Trump, keeping up his racially charged attacks against Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and the city of Baltimore, found a new target Monday in the Rev. Al Sharpton, the longtime civil rights activist and MSNBC talk show host who had scheduled an event there.
“I have known Al for 25 years. Went to fights with him & Don King, always got along well,” Trump tweeted. “He ‘loved Trump!’ He would ask me for favors often. Al is a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score. Just doing his thing. Must have intimidated Comcast/NBC. Hates Whites & Cops!”
Returning to his attacks on Cummings, who heads the House Oversight and Reform Committee and has been a strident critic of the administration’s border policies, Trump continued: “Baltimore, under the leadership of Elijah Cummings, has the worst Crime Statistics in the Nation. 25 years of all talk, no action! So tired of listening to the same old Bull…Next, Reverend Al will show up to complain & protest. Nothing will get done for the people in need. Sad!”
Trump claimed that Sharpton “would always ask me to go to his events.”
“He would say, ‘it’s a personal favor to me,’” the president continued. “Seldom, but sometimes, I would go. It was fine. He came to my office in T.T. during the presidential campaign to apologize for the way he was talking about me. Just a conman at work!”
Sharpton responded with a tweet showing Trump attending his National Action Network convention in 2006, “telling James Brown and Jesse Jackson why he respects my work.”
Trump stirred outrage over the weekend when he attacked Cummings, calling him a “brutal bully” whose district is “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”
“If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place,” Trump tweeted Saturday, adding: “No human being would want to live there.”
Trump has used similar language to attack other African-American officials representing largely black districts, without regard to the actual conditions there. Cummings’s Seventh District includes Johns Hopkins University and a mix of suburban, gentrifying and rundown neighborhoods.
Cummings responded in tweets of his own.
“Mr. President, I go home to my district daily,” the congressman replied. “Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors. It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch. But it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.”
Cummings asked Trump to work with him on bipartisan legislation, such as a bill that would lower prescription drug prices.
Trump, though, seemed more interested in grouping together Cummings and the so-called “Squad” — four Democratic congresswomen of color who the president recently suggested should “go back” to their “broken and crime infested” countries.
“If the Democrats are going to defend the Radical Left ‘Squad’ and King Elijah’s Baltimore Fail, it will be a long road to 2020,” the president tweeted Monday. “The good news for the Dems is that they have the Fake News Media in their pocket!”
At a press conference in Baltimore Monday, Sharpton said Trump is an equal-opportunity offender when it comes to attacks, but that his missives directed at Cummings and the city were clearly bigoted.
“I know Donald Trump. He’s not mature enough to take criticism. He can’t help it. He’s like a child,” Sharpton said. “But he has a particular venom for blacks and people of color.
“He doesn’t refer to any of his other opponents or critics as ‘infested.’ He does not attack their districts,” he continued. “He attacks Nancy Pelosi, he attacks Chuck Schumer … but he never said their districts or their states are places that no human being wants to live.”
Sharpton shrugged off Trump’s attacks against him.
“He calls me a troublemaker. Yes, I make trouble for bigots,” Sharpton said. “As far as me being a con man, if he really thought I was a con man, he’d be nominating me for his cabinet.”
- Dylan Stableford, Yahoo News, July 29, 2019