Rep. Elijah Cummings called President Trump’s attacks against him and the city he represents a distraction and defended Baltimore against Trump’s criticisms that it was a “rodent-infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.”
Cummings, a Democrat and the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told the hundreds of reporters gathered at the National Press Club on Tuesday that Trump’s “blatant attempts to attack my community in Baltimore” were meant to “divide us as a country.” Trump’s criticisms were intended to “distract us from all that unites us,” he said, and leave the nation less able to “combat the dangers our country faces.”
Cummings was hit with a dayslong Twitter salvo by Trump in late July just days after the Oversight Committee issued a subpoena for records of the private communications of numerous White House officials, likely including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and possibly his daughter Ivanka Trump, too.
The committee wants to know whether federal laws governing “official business” communications were violated when texts and emails were sent on private accounts both to and from officials in the White House. Cummings uncovered earlier this year that twenty security clearance denials in the White House were overturned by higher-ups, and it was also revealed that Kushner was using WhatsApp to communicate with foreign leaders and to conduct business overseas.
Cummings, whose Maryland district includes who West Baltimore as well as some suburban areas, has complained the Trump administration has stonewalled his efforts to obtain documents and to interview witnesses, and the chairman has not held back criticism of what he sees as the mistreatment by federal authorities of migrants held in detention at the southern border.
“Elijah Cummings has brutal bully, shouting, and screaming at the great men and women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous,” Trump tweeted in response a couple weeks ago.
And at a rally last week, Trump again criticized Baltimore, saying that “the homicide rate in Baltimore is significantly higher than El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala.”
Cummings had spoken briefly about Trump’s attacks previously, inviting him to see Johns Hopkins University and to tour the Baltimore neighborhoods.
“I want my neighbors to know how humbled and — oh God! — so proud I am that they have trusted me to represent them in the Congress of the United States of America,” Cummings said. “Thank you, Baltimore. Thank you.”
His neighbors “by and large” are “the most determined, hard-working, and deserving people that I know,” he said.
Cummings said that “honest and candid conversations” were a good thing and that “we do not hesitate to critique and protest what is lacking and what is wrong in the city.” He said that fair criticisms are needed if things are going to change for the better. But the congressman said that “unbalanced criticism” can reinforce existing problems by “causing us to doubt our ability to improve” and by “stepping on the hopes of our children and the hopes of our people.”
But the oversight chairman ultimately shrugged off the war of words over Baltimore as a sideshow. He stressed that his committee was focused on addressing issues like prescription drug pricing, voting rights, criminal justice reform, and opioid abuse while investigating controversies like that surrounding the Commerce Department’s efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census and combating what he saw as the “waste, fraud, and abuse” within the Trump administration. Cummings said the battles between his committee and the White House were part of a “fight for the soul of our democracy.”
He said the people of Baltimore “are no different than the people of Texas or Ohio or anywhere else in our great nation.”
Cummings also used his speech to call for a change in the tone and tenor of national debates as he condemned the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, in which at least 30 people were killed. Cummings called said that he was a man of faith and believes prayer works, but that the American people “want action” and “want it now.” And he called for the background check bill which had passed the House to become law, saying the Senate could pass it if Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell brought it to the floor, and urging the president to then sign it.
“As a country, we finally must say that enough is enough,” Cummings said. “That we are done with the hateful rhetoric, that we are done with the mass shootings, that we are done with white supremacist domestic terrorists terrorizing our country and terrorizing everything we stand for and everything our phenomenal military has fought for.”
