Posted on July 29, 2019

President Trump Is Right About Baltimore

Robert Hampton, American Renaissance, July 29, 2019

Last weekend, President Donald Trump noticed that black-run Baltimore is a disaster. In tweets aimed at Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings and his complaints about border control, the President listed some of Baltimore’s problems:

Many Democrats and journalists said President Trump’s comments were racist. Some claimed Baltimore is a great city. They used the hashtags #BaltimoreStrong and #WeAreBaltimore to promote “Charm City.”

The President then went further. He tweeted videos of Baltimore streets lined with garbage. He cited the city’s high crime rate. He called Rep. Cummings a racist. He brought up Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 comparison of Baltimore to a Third-World country. When Al Sharpton tried to horn in on the conversation, the President called him “a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score,” adding that Ref. Al “hates Whites & Cops!”

Baltimore, Maryland – Deserted row houses boarded up and gated off. (Credit Image: © Edwin Remsberg/VW Pics via ZUMA Wire)

Mr. Trump’s tweets did not persuade his critics. David Simon, creator of the TV series The Wire, about Baltimore drug crime, tweeted: “If this empty-suit, race-hating fraud had to actually visit West Baltimore for five minutes and meet any of the American citizens who endure there, he’d wet himself.”

The Wire depicted Baltimore as corrupt and dangerous — just the sort of place Americans have to “endure” — yet Mr. Simon denied his program supported the President: “The show addressed itself to the systemic and historical forces arrayed against the American city for generations,” he tweeted. “It wasn’t so submoronic as to argue that one US representative could be held accountabile [sic] for US urban policy or lack thereof. For that, we require Trump.” Mr. Simon blamed white flight and tough-on-crime policies. The usual story: blame whitey.

But whites haven’t run Baltimore in decades. It’s had one white mayor over the last 30 years. Nearly all major public officials are black. It is one of the blackest cities in the nation: 65 percent of the population.

At least Mr. Simon recognizes Baltimore has problems even if he thinks they are our fault. Other critics ignored or denied them. Journalist Molly Jong-Fast tweeted a picture from the city’s gentrified Inner Harbor. Inner Harbor is hardly a typical neighborhood, and its commercial tenants are defecting.

The Baltimore Sun argued in an anti-Trump editorial that Rep. Cummings’s district is best represented by Johns Hopkins Hospital and “the beauty of the Inner Harbor or the proud history of Fort McHenry.” The Baltimore Sun claimed it is better to have “a few vermin” than to be one like Mr. Trump. Ironically, the same paper published an op-ed in 2016 that said Mr. Trump was right to declare Baltimore and other miserable cities disasters.

The President’s critics can’t hide the ugly facts about an ugly city. It has the highest murder rate–56 per 100,000 people–of any American city over 500,000. That rate is higher than those of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Many people who claim Baltimore is wonderful think Central Americans deserve asylum here so they can escape violence.

Even the Inner Harbor isn’t immune from black violence. In May, hundreds of black teenagers brawled in the gentrified area. The white Saturday crowds fled.

Criminals robbed (white) Baltimore deputy police commissioner Daniel Murphy and his wife at gunpoint last week. Other thugs beat and robbed a civilian police employee in Inner Harbor a few days later.

The city’s leaders are corrupt. Two of Baltimore’s last four mayors resigned after corruption charges. In May, Mayor Catherine Pugh resigned because she swindled the University of Maryland’s Medical System of hundreds of thousands of dollars through a fraudulent book deal. Baltimore’s previous police commissioner — appointed by Miss Pugh — resigned over tax fraud and was later convicted. The next mayor may be Sheila Dixon. The last time she was in that position, she was convicted of embezzlement.

One-third of Baltimore’s schools have zero students proficient in math.

The city’s rat problem is real. Media consistently include Baltimore in lists of America’s rattiest cities. Animal Planet called Baltimore the third worst “rat city” in the world. PBS aired a documentary about Baltimore’s rodent problem just last year. TV news crews caught Mayor Pugh in September 2018 repulsed by the horrible rat stench in the city’s most violent neighborhoods. She said she could smell the dead animals and that the city should “take all this s**t down” — meaning the neighborhood. A rat photobombed a Fox affiliate live shot about Mr. Trump’s tweets.

Rats are a menace. They once burrowed under a Baltimore garbage truck and caused it to sink to its axels. Rats overran the truck, and ate its contents. Baltimore spent nearly $9 million to buy rat-resistant garbage cans in 2015.

The city’s extermination efforts don’t work. “They reduced nothing,” one local told the Baltimore Sun.

Coincidentally, Baltimore also has a “perpetual trash problem,” in the words of an April editorial from the Baltimore Sun. “Why can’t we have a clean city?” reads the opening sentence. The answer? Residents lack basic decency:

[A] cultural shift in the city needs to take place if Baltimore is to become home to clean streets and alleys. A change where people say it’s not OK to throw that hamburger wrapper out of my window because I have pride in my city. Those who don’t live in the city need to think about how they’d feel if somebody threw trash in their backyard as if it were the community landfill. To put it simply, too many people need a lesson in basic decency.

Baltimore will have trash-strewn streets, rat-infested housing, semi-literate students, high body counts, and corrupt leaders as long as it remains one of America’s blackest cities. Baltimore is what happens when blacks run their own affairs. That’s why corporate media criticize President Trump rather than recognize the city’s real problems.

About Robert Hampton

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Robert Hampton is a contributing editor at American Renaissance. He is a Middle American who chose to wake up.