The Baltimore Sun editorial board again laid into President Donald Trump on Friday for turning the homicide rate in Baltimore into a campaign rally punchline.
During a rally in Cincinnati Thursday night, Trump compared the murder rate in Baltimore to that in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, then asked the crowd to shout out other examples.
“I believe it’s higher than– Give me a place that you think is pretty bad,” Trump goaded his audience. “This guy says Afghanistan. I believe it’s higher than Afghanistan. In our country, think of that.”
“This,” the Friday Sun editorial read, “is the behavior of a jerk, a clod, a dolt, a schmuck.”
Trump, predictably, blamed Democrats on Thursday for the homicides. It was the latest in a string of attacks aimed at Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), one of the President’s top congressional antagonists, that used the city as ammunition.
“This is someone who argues both sides, none of it sincerely, none of it truthfully,” the Sun’s editorial board wrote of Trump. “One moment it’s a lack of federal spending, the next moment he says all that is wasted. Or maybe it’s up to Elijah Cummings, one of 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, to save Baltimore. What, with a resolution on the House floor? President Trump doesn’t mean a word of it. He’s just lashing out. It’s all a performance. It’s all a show.”
After Trump claimed in his initial attack on Cummings that “no human being would want to live” in Baltimore, which is in the congressman’s district, the Sun’s editorial board responded: “Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.”
Read Friday’s editorial here.
