Baltimore Sun: Trump Is a Rat for Citing Problem Newspaper Itself Has Documented

Rat problem in Baltimore
Julie Jacobson/Associated Press
Penny Starr

The Baltimore Sun Editorial Board called the president of the United States a rat in an editorial over the weekend after Donald Trump tweeted about rats and other problems in the city and called out Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) for his lack of leadership in addressing the issues plaguing his constituents.

Cummings, chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, has repeatedly criticized the president and his immigration policies, and at a press conference at the Capitol last week, Cummings joined the ranks of Democrats who want to impeach Trump.

“Rep. Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA……” Trump tweeted on Saturday.

“….As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place,” Trump tweeted.

The Baltimore Sun immediately attacked the president in a commentary the newspaper editorial board penned and published the same day Trump tweeted with the headline, “Better to Have a Few Fats than To Be One:”

It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. The congressman has been a thorn in this president’s side, and Mr. Trump sees attacking African American members of Congress as good politics, as it both warms the cockles of the white supremacists who love him and causes so many of the thoughtful people who don’t to scream. President Trump bad-mouthed Baltimore in order to make a point that the border camps are “clean, efficient & well run,” which, of course, they are not — unless you are fine with all the overcrowding, squalor, cages and deprivation to be found in what the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector-general recently called “a ticking time bomb.”

This is a president who will happily debase himself at the slightest provocation. And given Mr. Cummings’ criticisms of U.S. border policy, the various investigations he has launched as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, his willingness to call Mr. Trump a racist for his recent attacks on the freshmen congresswomen, and the fact that “Fox & Friends” had recently aired a segment critical of the city, slamming Baltimore must have been irresistible in a Pavlovian way. Fox News rang the bell, the president salivated and his thumbs moved across his cell phone into action.

Then the newspaper claimed it would not “sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner” while calling him a rat and adding several other insults, including that the president is incompetent and has no integrity:

Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman’s name correctly (it’s Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.

This scathing editorial does not mention how the Baltimore Sun has repeatedly reported on the city’s tremendous rat problem, including almost one year earlier than Trump tweeted, that included their own tweet entitled, “Mapping Baltimore’s rat hot spots” and showed a city covered with the vermin.

Just this past weekend, the leftwing PBS aired a documentary called Rat Film, which aired for the first time in 2018.

Breitbart News reported:

The Baltimore Sun reported on February 26, 2018, that the documentary “about Baltimore’s rodent fight” was scheduled “to air on PBS” that evening:

Across walls, fences, and alleys rats not only expose our boundaries of separation but make homes in them. “Rat Film” is a feature-length documentary that uses the rat—as well as the humans that love them, live with them, and kill them–to explore the history of Baltimore. “There’s never been a rat problem in Baltimore, it’s always been a people problem.”

“Rat Film,” a documentary that takes the decades-long fight waged against Baltimore’s rat population and uses it as a lens through which to look at how the city has addressed myriad social issues over the decades.

And in September last year, the Fox News affiliate in Baltimore reported on the city’s mayor, Catherine Pugh, while touring an East Baltimore neighborhood.

“What the hell? We should just take all this shit down,” Pugh said as she walked past crumbling buildings.

“Whoa, you can smell the rats,” Pugh said.

The Fox coverage reported in the same story that rats aren’t the only problem in Baltimor, including the “three-year spike in city violence that resulted in more than 1,000 people being murdered in Baltimore.”

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