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Trump Says Baltimore Residents in ‘Hell’ as He Renews Attacks

Trump Says Baltimore Residents in ‘Hell’ as He Renews Attacks

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump said there’s “zero strategy” behind his attacks on a prominent black congressman and Baltimore, the city he represents, after his latest round of racially divisive remarks drew condemnation.

“There’s no strategy,” Trump told reporters after returning from a speech in Virginia where he was heckled by a state lawmaker. “I have no strategy. There’s zero strategy.”

He said is simply relating “facts” about Elijah Cummings, the black chairman of House Oversight and Reform Committee, and Baltimore, a city whose population is about 63% black.

Cummings’ committee voted last week to authorize subpoenas for work-related emails and text messages sent from the personal accounts of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the president’s son-in-law and daughter, who are senior advisers in the White House.

Trump’s attacks on Baltimore and on Cummings, one of his chief antagonists in Congress, follow his feud with four freshman Democratic congresswomen of color. His tweets about the women, in which he invited them to “go back” where they came from, were widely criticized as racist. Maryland lawmakers of both parties, including Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, condemned the president’s latest broadsides.

“The comments are just outrageous and inappropriate,” Hogan said in an interview on WBAL radio.

More than half of U.S. voters believe that the president is racist, including 46% of white voters, Quinnipiac University found in a poll released Tuesday.

‘Least Racist’

Before leaving for the Virginia speech, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown colony’s legislature, Trump claimed without substantiation that billions of dollars had been stolen in Baltimore and called on Cummings to investigate his hometown. Cummings’ panel has been focused on investigating Trump and his administration.

“I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world,” Trump told reporters at the White House. Black lawmakers in the state boycotted the event in protest of Trump’s remarks.

“What I’ve done for African Americans in two-and-a-half-years, no president has been able to do anything like it,” he said. Trump often boasts of the low unemployment rate for black and Latino workers under his presidency.

During his speech at the Jamestown event, Trump was interrupted by Ibraheem Samirah, a Democratic member of Virginia’s House of Delegates. Samirah shouted and held signs that read “go back to your corrupted home,” “deport hate” and “reunite my family and all shattered by systemic discrimination.”

Samirah was peacefully removed from the event while the crowd chanted, “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

Trump said that Baltimore, where the mayor recently resigned in the midst of a scandal involving sales of a children’s book she had authored, is “a corrupt city, there’s no question about it.” Cummings, he said, has an “iron hand” on the city, which he called “filthy dirty” and “so horrible.”

Pastor Meeting

Trump targeted yet another prominent black person on Monday, attacking activist Al Sharpton after he said on Twitter that he was traveling to Baltimore for an event to criticize the president’s remarks. “Hates Whites & Cops!” Trump said of Sharpton, a fellow New Yorker with whom he’s socialized in the past.

The president held a private meeting at the White House on Monday with people he described in a tweet as “wonderful Inner City Pastors.” Two of them, Alveda King and Bill Owens, the founder of the Coalition of African American Pastors, defended the president afterward.

Asked if Trump was racist, Owens said, “I find that hard to believe.” He said the meeting had been planned since at least last week and was “not damage control.”

Cummings, 68, recently criticized Trump’s policies on the U.S.-Mexico border, calling the treatment of migrant children at detention facilities there “government-sponsored child abuse,” and clashing with Trump’s acting Homeland Security chief, Kevin McAleenan, during a hearing.

Trump said after returning to the White House that Cummings’ criticism of McAleenan was “horrible.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Baltimore native, has defended Cummings as a champion “for civil rights and economic justice, a beloved leader in Baltimore, and deeply valued colleague.”

Majority-Black City

Cummings’s congressional district includes about half of Baltimore, including most of the majority-black precincts, and parts of adjacent Howard and Baltimore counties, including a mix of urban, suburban and rural areas. The district is about 36% white, 55% black and 4.9% Asian, according to Census data.

“Those people are living in hell in Baltimore,” Trump said. “They’re largely African American, they have a large African-American population.”

Baltimore’s former mayor, Catherine Pugh, resigned in May after allegations she received kickbacks from the sale of her children’s book to state institutions. She was the second mayor of the city to leave office amid allegations of corruption.

Trump criticizes many Democrats, but his comments about minority lawmakers are often particularly divisive. Representative Maxine Waters of California, the chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee, is another occasional target whom the president has repeatedly called “low IQ” on Twitter and in campaign rallies. And in 2017, Trump said Representative John Lewis’s Georgia district was “falling apart” and “crime infested.”

Democratic presidential candidates will hold their second round of debates in Detroit on Tuesday and Wednesday, another U.S. city where blacks comprise the majority of residents.

To contact the reporter on this story: Justin Sink in Washington at jsink1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Justin Blum

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