A18 0 N THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALTUESDAY, JULY 30, 2019 K
The 45th PresidentThe Agenda
BALTIMORE — The last time
Donald J. Trump blamed a black
man for the condition of this un-
doubtedly 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 Presi-
dent Barack Obama.
“Our great African American
president hasn’t exactly had a
positive impact on the thugs who
are so happily and openly destroy-
ing Baltimore!” Mr. Trump wrote
then on Twitter.
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, Repre-
sentative 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.
“This is the struggle that he
doesn’t know anything about,” the
Rev. Timmie Lee, from the Cor-
nerstone Christian Community
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.”
Mr. Trump’s weekend tweet-
storm 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 confer-
ence on the black economic
agenda — reverberated through-
out this long-suffering city, whose
troubles predated the Freddie
Gray uprising. City leaders and
residents are furious but not en-
tirely surprised that a president
who seems intent on exploiting ra-
cial and cultural tensions as a path
to re-election 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
Mr. Trump’s attacks “outrageous
and inappropriate,” though Mr.
Hogan — a Republican who was
once considered a possible prima-
ry-race challenger to Mr. Trump
— avoided going after the presi-
dent by name. Instead, he issued a
broad criticism of the dysfunction
of Washington.
City leaders were more pointed.
“No one in Baltimore is sur-
prised that the president is attack-
ing Baltimore,” the City Council
president, Brandon M. Scott, said
in an interview on Monday morn-
ing. “I think that this president is
someone who’s trying to get re-
elected 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
re-elected.”
Residents were more pointed
still.
“Trump is a buffoon. He looks at
this as an African-American com-
munity, and that’s all he sees.
That’s where his narrow mind is,”
said John Cheatham, 66, who said
he covers murder trials for a local
radio station, adding, “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 per-
cent black, is struggling with long-
term systemic problems and un-
stable political leadership. It has
gone through five police commis-
sioners in the past five years, and
its crime rate is out of control: The
city has recorded at least 33 more
homicides this year than New
York, despite being about one-
fourteenth the size.
The city is confronting jobless-
ness, homelessness, blocks of va-
cant housing, crushing poverty
and a huge wealth gap. According
to Lawrence Brown, an associate
professor at Morgan State Univer-
sity in Baltimore, the median an-
nual income for white families in
the city is roughly $76,000, while
the median income for black fam-
ilies is $36,000. But those prob-
lems have much more to do with a
long history of housing segrega-tion — mandated by law in the
early 1900s — than with any one
politician, city and community
leaders say.
And if Mr. Trump wanted to do
something about it, he has the
power, through his Department of
Housing and Urban Develop-
ment, and his housing secretary,
Ben Carson, who was a prominent
surgeon in Baltimore for much of
his life.
Candidate Trump promised re-
peatedly to fix the problems of ur-
ban America. President Trump
appears determined to use it as a
political foil.
“If he were out here helping
people, it would be one thing,” said
Tyra Reeder, 18, who was giving
away cellphones as part of a gov-
ernment program to help the poor,
outside a CVS Pharmacy that was
looted and burned during the un-
rest of 2015. “But if he’s just watch-
ing from Trump Tower, drinking
out of his $10,000 cup, then he
can’t say anything about Balti-
more to me.”
Professor Brown put it thisway: “He’s the president of the
United States. The last time I
checked, Baltimore is part of the
United States. So if there is blame
that needs to go around, that in-
cludes everybody — from the gov-
ernor on down, and of course the
president.”
Baltimore is in some ways two
cities — one black and one white.
It is also a collection of neighbor-
hoods: The West Baltimore of Mr.
Trump’s imagination is just one
corner of a city that also boasts a
bustling harbor; new investment
along the waterfront; and hip
commercial strips like 36th Street,
known as the Avenue, in Hamp-
den, where rainbow flags fly from
storefronts and Casey Hunt, a 24-
year-old chemist, was sipping a
National Bohemian — the local
beer known as Natty Boh — on
Monday afternoon.
“A lot of people like to talk”
badly about Baltimore, she said,
“but they’ve never been here.”
In the Druid Heights neighbor-
hood of West Baltimore on Mon-
day, Kevin Brown, 55, was tendinga garden where an empty lot used
to be — two blocks from where Mr.
Cummings lives — against the
backdrop of a colorful mural
painted on the brick wall of a his-
toric home. The owner had
planted it in an effort to beautify
the neighborhood.
“Everybody here helps each
other,” Mr. Brown said, adding
that that is something Mr. Trump
knows little about.
Throughout the city, there was a
sense of real pain. Baltimore is ac-
customed to being painted as
downtrodden and falling apart.
Now the president of the United
States is reinforcing that percep-
tion on his Twitter feed.
“People tend to hear these hurt-
ful words and internalize it,” said
the Rev. Cleveland T. A. Mason, a
Baptist minister who was meeting
with faith leaders on Monday at
the New Shiloh Baptist Church,
where Freddie Gray was eulo-
gized four years ago. “These
things that are being said by the
president of the United States are
more hurtful because of who heis.”
Mr. Cummings — a son of South
Carolina sharecroppers who
moved to Baltimore to be preach-
ers — has represented Baltimore
for more than 20 years. After the
2015 unrest, he went onto the
streets of West Baltimore, where
he lives, to try to keep the peace.
His district also includes some
white suburbs, and in 2018, he won
re-election with 76 percent of the
vote.
In West Baltimore, the kerfuffle
around Mr. Trump’s tweets was
tempered by an acknowledgment
that any criticism of Charm City
was going to have some truth to it.
On a street corner a few blocks
from the Penn-North metro sta-
tion, where the CVS drugstore has
been rebuilt and two police cars
sat on the plaza, Isaiah Lee was
helping his uncle at the street
stand in a vacant lot strewn with
trash.
“Look at where we live at,” Isai-
ah said. “I mean, Baltimore may
be not that great, but Baltimore is
not what you think it is.”Baltimore Becomes Used
To Playing Trump’s Foil
Charles Street in Baltimore. The city’s residents acknowledge struggles but say President Trump has mislaid blame for the problems.
ANNA MONEYMAKER/THE NEW YORK TIMESBy SHERYL GAY STOLBERGIf so, this would hardly be the
first time that one has used the
other for professional or political
gain.
In 1989, Mr. Sharpton led dem-
onstrations at Mr. Trump’s Plaza
Hotel “because of what he did to
the Central Park Five,” he said in
an interview on Monday, referring
to the defendants in the rape case.
It was one of the most widely
publicized crimes of the 1980s,
when crime in New York was far
more prevalent than it is now. The
case pushed the rawness of racial
animosity into the public conver-
sation, which was nothing new in
New York, but the jogger attack
horrified the city.
Mr. Trump took out full-page
advertisements demanding the
reinstatement of the death pen-
alty. The five defendants were
convicted, but their sentences
were vacated 14 years later, based
on DNA evidence and a confes-
sion from another man. Mr. Trump
has refused to apologize for his ac-
tions or comments at the time.
By then, the two were already
“classic New York characters,” re-
called George Arzt, the press sec-
retary to Mayor Edward I. Koch.
“There was a clash of who is the
loudest voice in New York,” he
said, adding that the two made Mr.
Koch’s tenure — which was
marred by racial tensions — more
difficult.
“Koch’s problem as mayor is
that he had Trump on one side and
Al Sharpton on the other side,” Mr.
Arzt said. “Both of them were in-
flaming things.”
A year or so before the jogger in
Central Park was attacked, Mr.
Sharpton played a large role in
publicizing another case that
stunned New York: TawanaBrawley, a teenager from Wap-
pingers Falls, N.Y., near Pough-
keepsie, said she had been kid-
napped, tortured and raped by a
group of six white men who left
her wrapped in a plastic bag.
But the incident never hap-
pened; Mr. Sharpton was found
guilty of defamation for claiming
that Steven A. Pagones, a former
Dutchess County assistant dis-
trict attorney, had been involved
in the assault.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Sharpton,
who seemed to regain his footing
quickly, became more prominent
over time, and there were over-
laps.
In 2009, both made the Museum
of the City of New York’s list of the
400 New Yorkers who had made a
difference in the 400 years since
Henry Hudson’s voyage along the
river that was later named for
him.
“When you are in New York you
know people that are high profileand have a certain amount of
power,” Mr. Sharpton said in the
interview. He said he had “no rela-
tionship with Donald Trump —
I’ve never been to Mar-a-Lago. I
never hung out with him.”
Mr. Trump, on Twitter, sug-
gested otherwise. “Went to fights
with him & Don King, always got
along well,” Mr. Trump wrote. “He
‘loved Trump!’ He would ask me
for favors often. Al is a con man, a
troublemaker, always looking for
a score. Just doing his thing. Must
have intimidated Comcast/NBC.
Hates Whites & Cops!”
Mr. Sharpton said he believed
that Mr. Trump, a casino owner in
the 1980s and 1990s, was more in-
terested in using him to find favor
with local officials on the Atlantic
City Council.
Mr. Sharpton said on Monday
that the trip was “totally transac-
tional, and I understood that.” He
added, “Don and him were doing
business. Yeah, I would sit at thefights.”
Over the years, Mr. Trump and
Mr. Sharpton have expressed
grudging admiration for each
other. In a 2016 interview with Po-
litico, Mr. Sharpton remarked that
the president has “called me
names on Fox and all of that, but
Donald Trump knows deep down
in his heart that I believe in what
I’m doing, and I know that he be-
lieves in what he’s doing.”
Even in the president’s calling
Mr. Sharpton a con man and a
troublemaker on Twitter, he said
that he had “known Al for 25
years,” adding that they “always
got along well.”
The president, in a follow-up
Twitter post, said that Mr. Sharp-
ton “would always ask me to go to
his events. He would say, ‘It’s a
personal favor to me.’ ”
Mr. Trump added that Mr.
Sharpton had visited him at
Trump Tower “during the presi-
dential campaign to apologize forthe way he was talking about me.
Just a con man at work!”
Mr. Sharpton said in the inter-
view on Monday that the episode
never happened.
“Him saying that I met with him
during the campaign in ’16 is a lie,”
he said. The last time he saw Mr.
Trump in person was in 2015, he
said — before Mr. Trump an-
nounced his candidacy for presi-
dent.
“He came with a thumb hand-
shake,” Mr. Sharpton recalled,
“and he said, ‘You gotta do what
you gotta do, I gotta do what I
gotta do.’ ”
As for being called a con man,
Mr. Sharpton said that Mr. Trump
must not have meant it.
“If he really thought I was a con
man, he’d be nominating me for
his cabinet,” Mr. Sharpton said, to
laughter, at a news conference in
Baltimore on Monday. He then
added that Mr. Trump had called
him “right after he was elected.”Long, Fraught History of Trump and Sharpton, 2 New York Personalities
From Page AMaggie Haberman contributed re-
porting.
meeting on Monday about how to
help the black community. Aides
said the event was planned long
before the fight with Mr. Cum-
mings as part of a bid by Jared
Kushner, the president’s son-in-
law and senior adviser, to win Afri-
can-American votes next year.
But if the White House had
hoped for a show to shield the
president from his detractors, it
did not materialize. Mr. Trump,
who enjoys inviting news cameras
into meetings to showcase his vis-
itors and expound on his views,
kept the encounter behind closed
doors, and just two of the attend-
ees publicly testified afterward on
the White House driveway to his
good faith in wanting to improve
life for African-Americans.
“The president is concerned
about the whole nation, about ev-
erybody in the nation,” said
Alveda C. King, a niece of the Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a
leader of an anti-abortion group
who also belongs to “Women for
Trump” and is a Fox News con-
tributor. “So I want us to remem-
ber that we’ve been designed to be
brothers and sisters. One member
of the human race. Not separate
races.”
The Rev. Bill Owens, the
founder of the Coalition of African-
American Pastors, a group that
opposes same-sex marriage, said
he found it “hard to believe” that
Mr. Trump was a racist, citing the
president’s support for opportuni-
ty zones and an overhaul of crimi-
nal justice laws.
Asked about the president’s at-
tacks on Mr. Cummings, Mr. Ow-
ens demurred. “Well, those are his
words,” he said. “I don’t want to
second-guess what he says be-
cause I hear a lot of things. I see
also people pandering to black
people, to get them on board with
some of their agenda.”
Mr. Trump’s latest tweets pro-
voked increasingly angry reac-
tions in Baltimore and increas-
ingly acute concerns inside the
West Wing. Gov. Larry Hogan of
Maryland, a Republican, criti-
cized the attack on the state’s larg-
est city as “outrageous and in-
appropriate,” and an ally of both
Mr. Cummings and Mr. Trump in
the House defended the congress-
man against the president.
Several White House officials
expressed agreement during a
senior staff meeting on Monday
morning that the president’s at-
tacks were a bad move, according
to people informed about the dis-
cussion, but they were uncertain
who could intervene with him —
or if anyone would even dare try.
They privately scoffed at the
idea that it was strategy rather
than impulse, concluding that any
political benefit he might deriveby revving up his conservative,
largely white base could be offset
by alienating more moderate vot-
ers in the suburbs of states like
Wisconsin and Michigan that he
needs to win a second term.
Three advisers said the presi-
dent complained about Mr. Cum-
mings throughout the weekend.
Two of those advisers said the real
source of his ire was the decision
by the House Oversight and Re-
form Committee, which Mr. Cum-
mings leads, to authorize subpoe-
nas for all work-related texts and
emails sent or received by Mr.
Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the
president’s elder daughter and
senior adviser, on personal ac-
counts.
In taking on Mr. Sharpton, the
president confronted a fellow vet-
eran of New York’s often inflam-
matory racial politics. Mr. Trump
was evidently peeved that Mr.
Sharpton traveled to Baltimore on
Monday to denounce the attacks
on Mr. Cummings.
“I have known Al for 25 years,”
Mr. Trump wrote. “Went to fights
with him & Don King, always got
along well. He ‘loved Trump!’ He
would ask me for favors often. Al
is a con man, a troublemaker, al-
ways looking for a score. Just do-
ing his thing. Must have intimi-
dated Comcast/NBC. Hates
Whites & Cops!”
Mr. Sharpton, a longtime civil
rights leader and MSNBC host,
fired back during his appearance
in Baltimore.
“Called me a troublemaker?”he said. “Yes, I make trouble for
bigots. I made trouble for him with
Central Park. I made trouble with
him for birtherism. I’m going to
keep making trouble for bigots. As
far as me being a con man, if he re-
ally thought I was a con man, he’d
be nominating me for his cabinet.”
Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Trump did
get along in the past even as they
clashed over the case of the Cen-
tral Park Five involving black and
Hispanic teenagers who were ac-cused of raping a white woman
but were later exonerated. Mr.
Sharpton grew increasingly criti-
cal after Mr. Trump began falsely
accusing President Barack
Obama of being born in Kenya.
Mr. Sharpton has his own com-
plicated history on race. He was
an outspoken activist through a
string of racially charged
episodes in New York in the 1980s
and 1990s, and was regarded in
that era alternately as a champion
of social justice or as a self-
promoting provocateur. He drew
broad criticism as one of the most
vocal supporters of Tawana Braw-
ley, an African-American teen-
ager whose claims of rape by agang of white men in 1987 were ex-
posed as a hoax.
Mr. Sharpton has reinvented
himself as a more measured,
mainstream national voice on civil
rights, and he ran for president in- His National Action Net-
work has become a force on the
political left and even Mr. Trump
twice attended its conventions.
The flare-up with Mr. Sharpton
came after Mr. Trump assailed Mr.
Cummings over the weekend,
saying the congressman should
spend less time criticizing the
handling of detained migrants at
the border and more time fixing
his “disgusting, rat and rodent in-
fested” district where “no human
being would want to live.”
On Monday, the president was
so obsessed with the congress-
man and Mr. Sharpton that he
started his day focused on them
and ended it that way as well. His
first tweet attacking Mr. Sharpton
came at 6:30 a.m. By 10:45 p.m.,
he was still at it, along the way
vaguely insinuating corruption by
Mr. Cummings without any hint of
evidence.
“Billions of dollars have been
pumped in over the years, but to
no avail,” Mr. Trump wrote. “The
money was stolen or wasted. Ask
Elijah Cummings where it went.
He should investigate himself
with his Oversight Committee!”
Mr. Cummings made no com-
ment on Monday. But in Balti-
more, Michael Steele, the former
Republican National Committee
chairman and Maryland lieuten-
ant governor who himself is black,
joined Mr. Sharpton to denounce
the president’s attacks.
Mr. Steele urged Mr. Trump to
visit Baltimore if he really cared
about conditions for people living
there. “Folks want to talk to you,”
he said. “So just show up. Put the
tweet down, brother, and show
up.”
Representative Mark Meadows
of North Carolina, a senior Repub-
lican on Mr. Cummings’s commit-
tee and a friend of the chairman’s,
broke his silence on Monday. Mr.
Meadows, who when accused of
racism himself was defended by
Mr. Cummings, sent a text to for-
mer Senator Rick Santorum, a
CNN commentator, to read on air.
“No one works harder for his
district than Elijah,” Mr. Meadows
said in the text as read by Mr. San-
torum. “He’s passionate about the
people he represents, and no, Eli-
jah is not a racist. I am friends
with both men, President Trump
and Chairman Cummings. I know
them both well, and neither is a
racist.”
Other Republicans rejected the
suggestion that Mr. Trump singles
out lawmakers of color.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, that’s ridic-
ulous — no, he does not,” said Sen-
ator Kevin Cramer, Republican of
North Dakota. “If African-Ameri-
can lawmakers are going after
him, he goes after them. If a white
lawmaker goes after him, he goes
after them. If there were striped
lawmakers and they went after
him, he’d go after them.”After Escalating His Attacks on Black Adversaries, the President Looks for a Shield
Peter Baker reported from Wash-
ington, and Maggie Haberman
from New York. Emily Cochrane
contributed reporting from Wash-
ington.
A pastor who supports
Trump declines to
‘second-guess’ him.
From Page A