“Our great African American president hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!” Trump wrote on Twitter then.
Now Trump is president himself, and he has written off this entire city as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested” place where “no human being would want to live,” and is blaming its longtime and revered congressman, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, for the city’s problems. But people here say even if their city has its struggles, Trump has worn out his right to point them out.
“This is the struggle that he doesn’t know anything about. He’s never been here, so he really doesn’t have anything to say,” the Rev. Timmie Lee from the Cornerstone Christian Church said as he stopped by a street stand he operates in West Baltimore, where his son Isaiah, 12, was helping sell sneakers and soap. “If he was raised up in this community, if he had any dealings with this community then he can speak to this community. Elijah Cummings is here. He walks through this community. He lives in this community.”
Trump’s weekend Twitterstorm assailing the congressman — which continued into Monday with an attack on the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader who was in Baltimore for a conference on the black economic agenda — reverberated throughout this long-suffering city, whose troubles predated the Freddie Gray uprising. City leaders and residents are furious but not entirely surprised that a president who seems intent on stoking racial divisions as a path to reelection in 2020 would train his fire on Baltimore.
On Monday, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland belatedly weighed in after absorbing criticism for an initially tepid response to the president’s comments. He called Trump’s attacks “outrageous and inappropriate,” though Hogan — a Republican who was once considered a possible primary challenger to Trump — avoided going after the president by name. Instead he issued a broad criticism of the dysfunction of Washington.
City leaders were more pointed.
“No one in Baltimore is surprised that the president is attacking Baltimore,” City Council President Brandon Scott said. “I think that this president is someone who’s trying to get reelected off us. So he is going to try to rally his base. He’s trying to stoke fears, racial biases, and he is trying to pull the worst out of American society in order to get reelected.”
Residents were more pointed still.
“Trump is a buffoon. He looks at this as an African American community, and that’s all he sees. That’s where his narrow mind is,” said John Cheatham, 66, a court reporter for a local radio station, even as he allowed that his city has entrenched problems. “If you had a Mount Rushmore of hate, he would be on it.”
It is not news to anyone here that Baltimore, which is 63% black, is struggling with long-term systemic problems and unstable political leadership. It has gone through five police commissioners in the past five years, and its crime rate is out of control: The city has recorded at least 33 more murders this year than New York, despite being about one-fourteenth the size. The mayor who presided during the unrest did not run for reelection, and her successor was forced to resign amid a corruption scandal.
The city is confronting joblessness, homelessness, blocks of vacant housing, crushing poverty and a huge wealth gap. According to Lawrence Brown, an associate professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore, the median annual income for white families in Baltimore is roughly $76,000. The median income for black families is $36,000. But those problems have much more to do with a long history of housing segregation — mandated by law in the early 1900s — than with any one politician, city and community leaders say.
And if Trump wanted to do something about it, he has the power, through his Department of Housing and Urban Development, and his housing secretary, Ben Carson, who was a prominent surgeon in Baltimore for much of his life. Candidate Trump promised repeatedly to fix the problems of urban America. President Trump appears determined to use it as a political foil.
“He’s the president of the United States,” Brown said. “The last time I checked, Baltimore is part of the United States. So if there is blame that needs to go around, that includes everybody — from the governor on down, and of course the president.”
In West Baltimore, the kerfuffle around Trump’s tweets was tempered by an acknowledgment that any criticism of Charm City is going to have some truth to it.
On a street corner just a few blocks from the Penn-North metro station where a drugstore was looted and burned during the Freddie Gray riots, Isaiah Lee was helping his uncle at the street stand in a vacant lot strewn with trash.
“Look at where we live at,” Isaiah said. “I mean Baltimore may be not that great, but Baltimore is not what you think it is.”
Lawrence Lanahan, an author and journalist who recently published a book, “The Lines Between Us,” about Baltimore’s racial divide, said city residents were used to the treatment and were up to challenging Trump back.
“You’re just a fruitcake with a lot of Twitter followers,” Lanahan said to the president. “Baltimore is a real place with real people that the dark side of American history has punished for decades, and if you are going to get a couple of yuks out of that and move on, then most people will tell you to” not bother.
He said something more colorful than “not bother,” however.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.