President Trump on Monday attacked Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) for the third straight day on Twitter, assailing the African American lawmaker and the city he represents.
“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,” the president tweeted early in the morning.
“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 good news for the Dems is that they have the Fake News Media in their pocket!” he added in a second tweet.
Over the weekend, Trump sent more than a dozen tweets criticizing the House Oversight and Reform Committee chairman and Baltimore.
{mosads}The weekend started with Trump describing the country’s 30th largest city and surrounding areas as a “very dangerous & filthy place” where “no human being would want to live,” and it ended with Trump calling Cummings — the son of sharecroppers in South Carolina — a “racist.”
Cummings’s committee has pursued aggressive investigations into the Trump administration.
The House Oversight and Reform Committee has voted to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for defying subpoenas; heard testimony from former Trump attorney Michael Cohen; held a hearing on conditions at the southern border; and authorized a subpoena for official communications from senior White House advisers Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
Cummings responded to Trump’s initial wave of insults on Saturday morning by rejecting the criticisms of Baltimore.
“Mr. President, I go home to my district daily. Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors,” Cummings tweeted. “It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch. But, it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.”
Democrats have rallied around Cummings to denounce the tweets as racist and condemn Trump’s open disdain for a major U.S. city.
The flurry marked the second time in three weeks that Trump targeted a prominent minority Democratic lawmaker and in many ways mirrored how his attacks on Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Minn.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) played out.