What ‘Infests’ Baltimore? The Segregation History Buried in Trump's Tweets

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump released a series of tweets accusing Elijah Cummings, the House Oversight Committee chairman and Democratic congressman, of neglecting his “rat and rodent infested mess” of a congressional district. “No human being would want to live there,” the president wrote of Cummings’s district, in response to Cummings calling conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border “inhumane.”

Cummings’ 7th District is a large and diverse one; it encompasses suburbs north and west of the city of Baltimore which are among the wealthiest in the nation. But Trump, whose outburst was apparently triggered by a segment on Fox News’s Fox and Friends that aired Saturday morning, wasn’t talking about those places: He was talking about West Baltimore, a high-poverty area that is predominantly African American.