Donald Trump may be regretting his attack on a Baltimore congressional district as “disgusting” and “rodent infested” this weekend.
On Saturday, the president launched into a Twitter attack on the district represented by Democrat Elijah Cummings, who had spoken out against unsanitary conditions at the U.S. border. Echoing a Fox News segment that aired just minutes before, Trump said that the border was clean and that it was Cummings who oversaw a squalid district.
“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 Trump wrote in the series of tweets .
Trump’s opponents were very quick to respond. While many slammed the attack on the majority-black congressional district as racist, others pointed out that Trump himself has a very spotty history when it comes to running clean properties.
On Sunday’s segment on the MSNBC show Joy AM , the panel discussed the many health code violations at Trump’s luxury Mar-a-Lago resort.
“Rust, mold, parasites. Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago cited for 78 health violations in the last three years,” host Joy Reid said as she read from an article on Trump’s flagship property. “Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is full of parasites. It’s infested.”
As Newsweek noted, Reid was pulling from a 2017 article from The Associated Press that uncovered a string of violations including rusting shelving, insufficiently refrigerated meats, unsafe seafood, and cooking staff not wearing hairnets. The report had generated considerable interest at the time it came out, as Trump spent nearly every weekend at Mar-a-Lago when it was in season, staying in the resort and hitting up his company’s golf course at a rate of more than twice a week.
Sounds like a dangerous, disgusting place with a serious mold infestation problem.
Don’t you agree @realDonaldTrump ? https://t.co/RVrm3Lbeb9
— Kaz Weida (@kazweida) July 27, 2019
Donald Trump wasn’t the only one catching some blowback from the attack on the Baltimore district. Many pointed out that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been accused of being a “slumlord” in the thousands of rental units he owns around the Baltimore area. As the Baltimore Sun reported, tenants living in Kushner’s apartments have accused the company of “poor maintenance, harsh rent collection techniques, and relentless pursuit of old and sometimes dubious debts generated after tenants moved out.” Tenants on Yelp described the apartment buildings as falling into disrepair, with construction crews leaving garbage in hallways and rodent infestations that were not addressed by management.
