DEMS/RACISM/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The last time Donald J. Trump blamed a black man for the condition of this undoubtedly troubled city, the year was 2015, the death of Freddie Gray in police custody had spawned a racial uprising, and the black man in question was President Barack Obama…Now Mr. 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, Representative Elijah E. Cummings, for the city’s problems. But people here say that even if their city has its struggles, Mr. Trump has lost his right to point them out…Mr. Trump’s weekend tweetstorm assailing the congressman — which continued into Monday with an attack on the Rev. Al Sharpton, a 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.”
–Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Baltimore to Trump: You Lost Your Authority to Criticize,” The new York Times online, July 29, 2019