Here's what the president tweeted in response to Cummings' criticisms of some of his policies:
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. His district is considered the Worst in the USA......Well, this sent the left into orbit. Somehow, these words were perceived, either sincerely or disingenuously, as a racist attack, presumably because the neighborhood Trump referred to is predominately African American or because Cummings is.
....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
It has sadly come to pass in our society that any criticism, regardless of its veracity, levelled at anything or anyone even remotely associated with an African American is ipso facto racist in the minds of today's progressives. How else could what Mr. Trump tweeted be construed as racist unless racism is now to be defined as any negative or disparaging action or remark made about a black person and/or his or her neighborhood?
You didn't vote for Barack Obama? That's interpreted as a sure sign of your racism. You wonder why our jails are filled with young black males? It's because our police and courts are racist. You worry about single motherhood in black communities? You wouldn't if you weren't racist, etc.
The Baltimore Sun printed one of the most vile editorials published by a major newspaper in the modern era in response to Trump's remarks. MSNBC and other progressive outlets repeatedly and with no explanation referred to Trump's tweets as self-evidently racist.
It didn't take long, though, for folks to do a little a digging and discover that Trump's comments were essentially identical to those of Baltimore's previous mayor, Catherine Pugh, herself a black woman: Is Pugh a racist? Perhaps the definition of racism might be amended to describe racism as any negative or disparaging action or remark made by a white person about a black person and/or his or her neighborhood. That way racism is only a character taint that white people possess. How convenient.
This is apparently the definition accepted by Joy Behar who stated the other day that it's "outrageous and stupid to call a black man a racist": What's "outrageous and stupid," of course, is the notion that only white people hate others because of the color of their skin.
Well, then it turned out that Trump's characterization of the Baltimore neighborhood in Cummings' district was also essentially identical to how presidential candidate Bernie Sanders described it in 2016 when he compared it to a third world country. Is one of the leftmost Democratic candidates for the presidency in 2020 also a racist?
Perhaps the definition should go through one more iteration and be amended to read that racism is any negative or disparaging action or remark made by a white Republican about a black person and/or his or her neighborhood.
Once we realize that this is in fact the working definition adopted by progressives like Behar and the folks at MSNBC and CNN then their response to Trump's transgressions will begin to make sense, even if their definition doesn't.
Benny Johnson of Turning Point USA did a walking tour of the worst part of the district and interviewed a number of residents. They all pretty much agreed with Trump's assessment. The neighborhood is a disaster.
Some of the residents were white, some black. Were the white residents racists and the black residents not?
The Sun's editorial mentioned above was largely as irrelevant as it was venomous.
The claims it made about Baltimore's attractions (Inner Harbor, Johns Hopkins) are completely beside Mr. Trump's point about the worst parts of Cummings' district, and the language it used to describe the president was far worse than anything Mr. Trump has employed against any of his political adversaries, and certainly worse than anything he said about Cummings.
But the Sun is a left-wing paper and unfortunately the left seems to have found a home in the polemical sewer. They wrote this:
Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman’s name correctly (it’s Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.All because President Trump said about one Baltimore neighborhood what everybody who lives there or has visited there has said about it. When it comes to Trump and/or race the left shows more than a little evidence of having completely lost its collective mind.