Elijah's Cummin'

U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, should have seen it coming (no pun intended there), and he probably did, when Donald Trump slammed him for spending too much time investigating him and not enough time trying to fix the rat-infested Baltimore neighborhoods he represents.  Indeed, Trump angered many a Baltimore resident - and native Baltimorean Nancy Pelosi - by suggesting that the entire city was a hellhole.  

Except that his district, Maryland's Seventh U.S. House District (a map of which is below), includes Baltimore neighborhoods that aren't stereotypical urban ghettos and also includes several suburban and some rural areas, with a good deal of it stretching along the Interstate 70 corridor forty miles west to the town of Mount Airy.  But not only does it include some black ghettos in black-majority Baltimore, it's also a black-majority district - about 54 percent black and 36 percent white, with other groups making up the rest of the district's population.  It's also the second-wealthiest and the second-best-educated black-majority House district in the country. 

Trump's comments are in keeping with his attitude that any black-majority piece of real estate must be a big slumscape.  Kind of weird for a guy whose first properties as a real-estate owner included an apartment house in East Orange, New Jersey, an overwhelmingly black suburb of Newark that has its run-down neighborhoods but also has some charming areas with homes as beautiful as any you'd find in the overwhelmingly white neighboring town of Glen Ridge.  And this isn't the first time Trump has attacked a black congressman representing a black-majority district; just before he moved into the White House (courtesy of Debbie Wasserman Schultz), he attacked Georgia congressman and civil-rights icon John Lewis for problems in his House district, even though the demographics in Lewis' district are similar to Cummings'.  If there's anything Trump can't stand more than a black congressman who can't stand him, it's a black congressman who's investigating him.  And these attacks are perfectly well-tuned to whip up his base and get them to the polls next year.

Trump and his supporters complain that his criticisms of Cummings are not racist but rather a frank examination of how Democratic policies toward the cities and local Democratic control of cities like Baltimore, which is a whole lot better off than one might think (despite former Mayor Catherine Pugh's forced resignation over a book deal gone bad, a continuation of old-fashioned Baltimore corruption), have failed inner-city populations and cities in general.  Someone should send Trump a video copy of native Baltimorean Barry Levinson's 1990 classic movie Avalon, which showed how cities declined as a result of pro-suburban, autocentric policies championed by both parties in the postwar decades.  Then maybe he'll get it.  (Yeah, right.)  This was the same Donald Trump who promised to rebuild our cities and towns but now exploits the problems of urban America to whip up anti-black sentiment.

But then, maybe what Trump is doing now isn't racist this time.  Because as I recall, Baltimore's last white mayor, Martin O'Malley, ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 but (again, courtesy of Debbie Wasserman Schultz) never got taken seriously.  I am convinced that, had O'Malley been Trump's opponent in the 2016 general election. Trump would have levied the same blistering attack for Baltimore's failings on him that he did on Cummings.  Assuming, of course, his attempt to identify O'Malley as the father of a single black TV newswoman's child based on a rumor started by Maryland Republicans didn't do the trick. (Irony.)

And you can bet that O'Malley, a Batlimorean by choice and a friend of Cummings, had a lot to say about Trump's tirade.

O'Malley should have run for President in 2020.