President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence, attends the Full Honors Ceremony for Secretary of Defense Esper Thursday, July 25, 2019, at the Pentagon in Arlington, Va. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
President Trump, in his bull-in-the-china-shop way, as Christopher Roach calls it, is daring Americans, especially black Americans, to look hard at the declining state of affairs of some of America’s largest cities.
As the uproar over his “go back” attack on the Squad seemed to be waning, Trump stirred up the racist chant once more with a tweet about Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and the appalling conditions in Cummings’ Baltimore district:
Elijah Cummings spends all of his time trying to hurt innocent people through ‘Oversight.’ He does NOTHING for his very poor, very dangerous and very badly run district!
President Trump’s latest remarks “evoked feigned surprise and horror,” writes Mr. Roach in American Greatness:
It also prompted a fact-free defense of conditions in Baltimore (reminiscent of the defense of squalid Haiti last year) and, of course, many said this his observations were simply racist.
Trump said something that everyone who has spent any time in America’s cities knows. Many of them are poor, dirty, badly governed, and dangerous—often the worst conditions are in black neighborhoods and majority-minority cities. These combined phenomena create a feedback of “white flight” and capital flight, as businesses, the tax base, and the middle class flee. Over the years, things have only gotten worse.
These majority-minority districts frequently elect useless demagogues, who deliver little, other than the rhetoric of flattery and blame. Cummings and his colleagues Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) are all archetypal cases. Not infrequently, extensive corruption is the handmaiden of these politicians—Detroit’s Kwame Kilpatrickcomes to mind. Trump’s message in recent weeks is straightforward: those who purport to represent these poor and desperate people provide little in the way of good government or service to them.
Trump’s critics may not like Trump or the president’s tweets. But as Mr. Roach reminds readers, the failure of political leaders to promote significant improvement of black communities and a renewal of moral and cultural life is indisputable.
A rat runs through a FOX45 Baltimore Reporter’s live shot during a story on President Trump’s tweet Baltimore is rat infestedhttps://t.co/s60inZ6TtK pic.twitter.com/R4LFxsPWeK
— FOX Baltimore (@FOXBaltimore) July 29, 2019
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