No charm in Trump’s bashing of Baltimore

David Simon’s riveting book “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets,” was published three years before I arrived in Baltimore in 1994. The town was still as gritty and dangerous in some places as Simon, a fellow Baltimore Sun reporter, described them in his book, which later spawned the acclaimed television series “The Wire.” Even so, it was clear why Baltimore was called “Charm City.” It still is.

Not just in touristy areas like the Inner Harbor and Fells Point, affluent enclaves like Guilford and Roland Park, or gentrified neighborhoods like Mount Vernon and Greenmount. Look closely and you will find Baltimore charming even within the challenged neighborhoods of East and West Baltimore where Simon collected notes for “The Corner,” his book about drug dealers and their customers.

That’s because people have charm, not streets or buildings.

Somewhere deep within the recesses of his mind, President Trump must know that. I bet he probably thinks of himself as a charm expert. He acts like he’s the expert on everything else — trade, war, peace, climate, the economy, even on who likes women “on the younger side.”

So why did he ignore what makes Baltimore “Charm City” and instead criticize it for having the same problems as any other city in America? This is a president who doesn’t care who gets hit when he tosses a bomb at an adversary. Baltimore was collateral damage; his target was U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings.

The 13-term congressman was a Maryland assemblyman when I first met him. He now chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which could play a role in a Trump impeachment, if it ever occurs. But it was Cummings’ criticism of the Department of Homeland Security’s treatment of detained migrants that ticked off Trump.

“As proven last week during aCongressional 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 Saturday. He later tweeted that Cummings’ district, which includes most of Baltimore, was the “Worst in the USA.”

Even if that were true, it would be an indictment of the Trump administration and its predecessors, which for decades have failed to adequately address the poverty, poor health, crime and grime found throughout urban America, including Washington, D.C. A short drive from the White House might show Trump some of the same things he criticized about Baltimore. something better made things worse.

Every president since Johnson shares some blame for that, including Barack Obama, but only Trump seems to relish in big cities’ despair. He knows his bashing won’t offend his overwhelmingly rural and suburban base, which he apparently doesn’t think he needs to expand.

Trump’s defenders say he isn’t a racist. But his language too often is tinged with derisive adjectives to describe black and brown people or the Latin and African countries their ancestors called home. That includes his infamous “shithole” description of destitute countries many migrants left to find a new life in the United States.

Trump’s choice of words isn’t the only evidence of racism; there’s also his silence. Thirty years later, he still refuses to apologize for placing newspaper ads that called for the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly convicted of raping a young white woman jogging in New York’s Central Park.

Neither has Trump ever apologized for the racism he and his father exhibited by excluding blacks from renting their apartments in Brooklyn and Queens in the 1970s. The Trumps agreed in a consent decree to stop discriminating. The Justice Department later accused them of violating the decree, but the original order expired, and the case was dropped.

That doesn’t mean the Trumps were exonerated.

The fact is our president has a history of racism that he has never disavowed, so when he verbally assaults minorities, including Cummings and the four progressive House members known as “The Squad” — Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez —it makes sense to make that connection.

Trump could have disagreed with Cummings without insulting the entire city of Baltimore, which has more charm than he has ever shown. Minneapolis, a mostly white city, has crime, grime and poverty issues, too.

If the president wants to make adifference, he would stop talking about the urban ills all of America’s cities suffer and do something about them. As he put it, what has he got to lose?

Jackson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and a member of the Chronicle editorial board.

Trump famously asked African Americans during his presidential campaign what they had to lose by voting for him. The answer is self-respect. It’s hard to support a man who prefers to bash black communities instead of helping them.

Baltimore’s problems are America’s problems, but there hasn’t been a comprehensive national program to address them since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. It failed miserably, but letting its ineffective programs die without replacing them with