6 NEWS Controversy of the week
Baltimore: Why Trump called it ‘disgusting’ and ‘infested’
Guess who just spent three days sending a tor-
rent of angry, “racist tweets,” said Timothy
O’Brien in Bloomberg.com. Yes, that’s right—
it was the President of the United States.
Reportedly upset by Rep. Elijah Cummings’
strong criticism of how people are being
treated at border detention facilities, President
Trump this weekend targeted the 68-year-old
African-American chairman of the House
Oversight Committee with a “racially
charged salvo of alternately bigoted, hostile,
and inaccurate insults.” Cummings himself
is a “racist,” Trump tweeted without expla-
nation, and his majority-black Maryland district, which includes
Baltimore, is a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where
“no human being would want to live.” Human beings obviously
do live in Baltimore, said Charles Blow in The New York Times,
but “rendering nonwhite people as subhuman” is a favorite trope
of our blatantly racist president. Before and after he was elected,
Trump has repeatedly used the degrading adjective “infested” to
describe places where black and brown people live. As with his call
for four nonwhite U.S. congresswomen—three of them U.S.-born—
to “go back” to their “crime-infested” countries of origin, Trump’s
rant against the “disgusting” city of Baltimore reveals how deeply,
and sincerely, white supremacy is “fused to his sense of the world.”
If acknowledging Baltimore’s poverty and chaos makes one a “rac-
ist,” then President Trump has plenty of company, said Seth Barron
in the New York Post. In a piece this March titled “The Tragedy of
Baltimore,” The New York Times indicted the city—which boasts
the highest homicide and overall crime rates in the U.S.—for “a fail-
ure of order and governance the likes of which few American cities
have seen.” In 2015, Sen. Bernie Sanders toured Cummings’ district
and commented, “You would think that you were in a Third
World country.” As for the supposedly telltale word “infested,”
Cummings himself in 1999 described his own district as
“drug-infested.” Are all these people racists? Or are they all,
including Trump, simply “right about Baltimore?”Oh, please, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com.
Trump’s visceral “association of African-
Americans with crime and filth” isn’t limited to
Baltimore. It dates back to his real estate days,
when denying apartments to blacks “was the
basis of the Trump business model.” More
recently, as Michael Cohen testified before
Congress, Trump while driving through Chicago remarked that
“only the blacks could live like this.” For the first time, we have a
U.S. president who routinely enjoys “disparaging parts of his own
country” as “disgusting hellholes.” Trump is “not even trying to
be everyone’s president,” said Zachary Wolf in CNN.com. Trump’s
“whole strategy” for 2020 is to “use race to divide the country” and
hope angry whites turn out in sufficient numbers to re-elect him.“It overly flatters Trump” to assume his embrace of overt racism
is part of some grand political strategy, said Eugene Robinson in
The Washington Post. More likely it’s a howl of “naked fear” from
a president who sees himself badly trailing Democrat Joe Biden in
the 2020 polls. He is also unnerved by continuing efforts by House
Democrats to get his tax returns and records of foreign business
relationships. “He has reason to be very afraid.” Baltimore does
have its problems, including rodents, said The Baltimore Sun in an
editorial. But at the risk of stooping to his level, we’d say this to
“the most dishonest,” most immoral, and most incompetent man
ever to occupy the Oval Office: “Better to have a few vermin living
in your neighborhood than to be one.”Only in America
QWealthy U.S. parents are
hiring “screen consultants” to
help them wean children off
digital devices. The consul-
tants are paid up to $250 per
hour to teach parents how to
fill the digital void in their off-
spring’s lives. “‘Is there a ball
somewhere? Throw the ball!’”
consultant Rhonda Moskowitz
says she advises parents.
“‘Kick the ball!’”
QAn anonymous couple is
suing a Los Angeles hotel be-
cause a window washer saw
them having sex. The couple’s
lawsuit says the worker wore
a smile of “obvious, prurient
pleasure” when he observed
their intimacy through the
15th-floor window, and that
because of the post-traumatic
stress disorder this experi-
ence inflicted, “their romantic
relationship has essentially
been extinguished and they
have since ended their rela-
tionship entirely.”Supreme Court accepts
wall construction
The Supreme Court authorized
the Trump administration
last week to use $2.5 billion
in defense funds to rebuild
fences on the U.S.-Mexico
border while litigation over the
spending is ongoing. In a 5-
decision, the Court’s conserva-
tive justices reversed lower
court orders to freeze con-
struction in Arizona, California,
and New Mexico. In response,
the American Civil Liberties
Union, which represents one
set of plaintiffs, said it would
seek an expedited hearing
before the 9th Circuit Court
of Appeals. Trump declared
“VICTORY” on Twitter after
the Supreme Court decision.
The legal battle is not finished,
but in a one-paragraph ruling,
conservative justices appeared
skeptical of lawmakers’ and
advocates’ standing to chal-
lenge the spending and hinted
they would side with the
Trump administration.Earthlings, after a large, previously undetected “city killer”
asteroid hurtled past Earth at 54,000 mph, missing the planet by
only 45,000 miles—less than a fifth of the distance to the moon.
“Sooner or later there will be one with our name on it,” said Alan
Duffy, lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia.
Chillin’,with the launch “Snowballs,” a “scientifically backed,
patent-pending” pair of freezable underwear designed to keep male
genitalia cool, comfortable, and fertile during the hotter months of
the year. “Kept area cool when needed,” said one satisfied reviewer.
Rehabilitation,after a British judge sentenced a man who had bro-
ken his ex-partner’s window to 50 minutes in jail, believed to be the
shortest sentence in British history. “I am truly sorry for my actions,”
a reformed Shane Jenkins, 23, wrote during his incarceration.Oenophiles,after President Trump threatened to put tariffs on
French wine and declared, “American wine is better than French
wine!” A teetotaler, Trump later said, “I just like the way they look.”
Automation,with an inspector general’s report that a supposedly
self-cleaning toilet in the Washington, D.C., metro system required
more than $500,000 in maintenance over 14 years, and nonetheless
“has been out of service since the fall of 2017.”
Privacy, after research revealed people ages 18 to 22 to be the
masters of sexting, with nearly 40 percent admitting to having sent
naked or seminaked pictures of themselves to another person. A
modest—but still impressive!—3 percent of people over 74, in what
Tom Brokaw calls “The Greatest Generation,” also admit to sexting.Good week for:
Bad week for:
Ge
ttyCummings: Trump’s target