Democrats Are Powerless to Keep Trump From Pointing Out How They Have Failed Baltimore

Democrats Are Powerless to Keep Trump From Pointing Out How They Have Failed Baltimore
A man sleeps on a bench in downtown on July 28, 2019 in Baltimore, Maryland. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Brian Cates
8/2/2019
Updated:
8/6/2019
Commentary
President Donald Trump took to his Twitter account on July 27 to call attention to the horrible conditions that exist for the people of Baltimore, especially those who live in Maryland’s 7th Congressional District. The congressional representative for that district happens to be Elijah Cummings, the current chairman of the powerful House Oversight and Reform Committee.

“Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous,” Trump wrote. “His district is considered the Worst in the USA.”

Trump continued: “As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming 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.”

The president appears to have made these tweets as a direct response to Cummings and other top Democrats spending hours during recent congressional hearings browbeating acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan and others over the crowded conditions at the border detention facilities.

When Cummings hasn’t been presiding over hearings where he screams at and berates U.S. border personnel for supposedly being incompetent and heartless at their jobs, he has been chairing the Oversight Committee’s investigations of the president for his supposed treason with Russia, for allegedly obstructing the special counsel’s investigation, and anything else Democrats can think of.

Trump would return to the subject of Cummings on his Twitter account several times that day:
“Why is so much money sent to the Elijah Cummings district when it is considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States. No human being would want to live there. Where is all this money going? How much is stolen? Investigate this corrupt mess immediately!
“So sad that Elijah Cummings has been able to do so little for the people of Baltimore. Statistically, Baltimore ranks last in almost every major category. Cummings has done nothing but milk Baltimore dry, but the public is getting wise to the bad job that he is doing!” Shining a spotlight on Cummings’s own district immediately caused a fierce and intense backlash. Far from backing off, Trump has continued to revisit the subject multiple times.

By July 30, Rev. Al Sharpton was on his way to Baltimore to join the chorus of those yelling how racist Trump is for demanding to know why the billions of dollars pumped into that city seem to have done nothing to improve conditions there. Trump didn’t even wait for Sharpton to arrive, calling him a “con man” who hates whites and cops.

The amazing thing to me from watching this all unfold is how the old Democratic playbook simply doesn’t work on Trump because Democrats have never had to deal with anyone even remotely like him.

After a few days of being relentlessly called a racist by top Democratic leadership and the mainstream media, previous Republican presidents and candidates would have been found in a corner, curled into a ball and sobbing, “I’m sorry, I didn’t really mean it, please don’t hurt me, I won’t do it again! Please ... please tell me you’re still my friends!”

Trump? Well, Trump keeps coming right back at them, snarling for more, and they literally do not know how to respond to him, other than to keep doing what isn’t working.

Is it even possible for Democrats to yell “Trump is a racist” more loudly than they have been in the past few days? Because I’m not sure it’s possible.

After three straight days of Democrats insisting Trump was being racist by talking about how bad things have gotten in Baltimore, the Trump War Room Twitter account fired back by showing a video in which Cummings himself talks about how bad conditions are in his own district—back in 1999!

How can anybody watch that video of Cummings in 1999 and say he and the Democrats running Baltimore in the past two-plus decades are anything but complete failures?

Why is Trump suddenly calling out Cummings? I believe it very well could be that Trump is doing this now because he knows something is going to be revealed soon.

On April 25, both the FBI and the IRS conducted a series of surprise raids in Baltimore. Records were seized at city hall and at the home of then-Mayor Catherine Pugh and several of her top aides. At the time, Pugh was ensnared in a growing scandal related to a children’s book she'd published, so it was assumed at the time the raids were only related to that. This might not be the case.
After insisting she’d fight, Pugh buckled after a week and resigned from office on May 2.

I’ve been waiting for almost two full months to find out what was seized in those raids and where the trail is headed. I’m pretty sure Trump already knows.

During an interview on Fox News, Housing and Urban Development Regional Director Lynne Patton made a startling claim: Cummings’s 7th District—not the entire city of Baltimore, mind you, just the 7th District—had received a staggering $16 billion in federal money in 2018 alone.

Cummings has been a political force in the city of Baltimore for 36 years—23 of those years as the representative of Maryland’s 7th District, which includes West Baltimore, and prior to that, 13 years in the Maryland House of Delegates.

And yet we’re being told he’s supposed to be viewed as some kind of helpless bystander as conditions in the city grew increasingly worse as the years rolled by.

For decades, the Democratic machine that runs Baltimore has proffered the GOP and racism as the chief reasons for the increasing problems the denizens of the city are struggling with. When pressed, members of that machine will claim the only thing holding up the progress in their city is that they still aren’t being given enough money to fix the problems.

Think I’m joking? Baltimore city councilman Robert Stokes made both these claims to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on his program.

That gentleman in the video is a perfect example of the kind of ‘leadership’ the Democrats have been giving to Baltimore for longer than I’ve been alive.

It’s crystal clear at this point: If Democrats were ever going to admit it was their own policies that have brought about this sad state in these inner cities, they’d have made this admission long before now. They haven’t.

So it’s time to accept the fact they simply never will. And if they never will make this admission, that means as long as they are running these cities, things are never going to get better.

Trump is exactly right to be demanding to know where all the billions and billions of dollars in federal aid to Baltimore went.

The president didn’t mince words on the White House lawn on July 30 as he prepared to depart for Jamestown, Virginia, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the original colony established there. He deliberately used the word “stolen” when discussing the “billions and billions of dollars” that were sent from Washington to Baltimore.

Democratic Party leaders and their media hacks will all keep trying to endlessly scream “racist” as loud and for as long as they can, but it won’t work. Their voices will get hoarse and most of the country will tune them out and focus on the evidence that proves this is a massive scandal.

There is blatant, obvious corruption in Baltimore that has been right out there in the open for decades. Everybody saw it and knew about it, but nobody could stop it. No one was allowed to ask questions about this. Trump is changing that.

The president will keep shining that spotlight on big urban cities whose Democratic leaders have utterly failed the people they are supposed to be serving while billions of dollars in federal aid sent to help these cities seems to have poured straight into a black hole.

Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media can keep right on loudly calling Trump a racist for doing this.

Watch who blinks first.

It won’t be Trump. Brian Cates is a writer based in South Texas and author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter at @drawandstrike.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Brian Cates is a former contributor. He is based in South Texas and the author of “Nobody Asked for My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!”
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