Trump Attacks Bernie Sanders Over Baltimore Comments After Binging on Fox & Friends

President Donald Trump continued his attacks on Rep. Elijah Cummings and the city of Baltimore Monday morning, defending his widely condemned initial remarks by citing years-old comments from Sen. Bernie Sanders.

This latest controversy has followed a common pattern. Trump tweets something random and offensive, gets decried by critics as racist, and then his media supporters spend the next week trotting out the most inventive defenses to explain away the entire dumb imbroglio. Trump catches wind of those inane defenses while binging on cable news and tweets them out.

The latest argument for the Trump defender: Trump’s tweets were not racist, because Bernie Sanders once called out poverty in Baltimore!

Trump echoed those arguments in a tweet Monday, which came after a morning of Fox & Friends dutifully covering the Sanders comments.

“Crazy Bernie Sanders recently equated the City of Baltimore to a THIRD WORLD COUNTRY!” Trump wrote. “Based on that statement, I assume that Bernie must now be labeled a Racist, just as a Republican would if he used that term and standard!”

Trump concluded his tweet by referring to Cummings as “King Elijah.”

….even to new heights of success and glory, but not with King Elijah and that crew. When the leaders of Baltimore want to see the City rise again, I am in a very beautiful oval shaped office waiting for your call!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2019

Sanders made the following comments at a press conference during a visit to Baltimore in 2015: “But anyone who took the walk that we took around this neighborhood would not think you were in a wealthy nation, you would think that you were in a Third World country.”

“But today what we’re talking about is a community in which half of the people don’t have jobs,” he continued. “We’re talking about a community in which there are hundreds of buildings that are uninhabitable. We’re talking about a community where kids are unable to go to schools that are decent.”

As the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel points out, there is a difference between Sanders’ comments calling attention to poverty in Baltimore and Trump attacking the city as “disgusting” and “rat and rodent infested” because Cummings is a political opponent.

I, too, cannot tell the difference between a candidate drawing attention to poverty and a president writing off an entire city because the congressman made him angry. pic.twitter.com/FauIfiqCAP

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) July 28, 2019

Politico’s Kyle Cheney offers further perspective:

I was on the walking tour of Baltimore that Sanders took the day he said this — it was actually part of an effort to court black support during the primary. Here’s the fuller story: https://t.co/wqidJqAH7Q https://t.co/aHNJCk3lFB

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) July 29, 2019

Like Trump’s initial broadside against an entire American city, these latest tweets appear to be inspired by Fox & Friends. He binged on the show all weekend. On Monday, the Fox News morning show opened at 6 a.m. with the Sanders remarks, in their devoted attempt to cover for the president, with host Pete Hegseth accusing Trump’s critics of a double standard. Moments before Trump’s tweets about Sanders, they covered the topic again.

“It’s a pretty straightforward policy argument,” Hegseth said of Trump’s initial tweets. See those tweets below, and watch the Fox & Friends segment above.

….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

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2019

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