Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said on Sunday President Donald Trump’s tweets against Rep. Elijah Cummings were not racist, explaining the president was just fighting back against “lies.”
On Saturday, Trump tweeted that Democrat Cummings’ Baltimore-area district “is considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States.
No human being would want to live there.”On “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace pointed out that the median household income in Cummings’ district is in the upper half nationally and that Columbia, Md., has been called the “safest city” in the country.
“What this is about, though, is the president fighting back against what he saw as being illegitimate attacks about the border," in a recent House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing chaired by Cummings, Mulvaney responded.
During the hearing on the U.S.-Mexico border, Cummings had questioned acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, asking “What does that mean when a child is sitting in their own feces, can’t take a shower?”
Mulvaney disputed the assertions, calling them inaccurate and noting Cummings hasn’t been to the border during the Trump administration.
“When the president hears lies like that, he is going to fight back, and that’s what you saw in those tweets,” Mulvaney said.
And Wallace responded: "This goes back to what happened with the four members of the Squad: Nobody objects to the president defending his border policies, but this seems, Mick, to be the worst kind of racial stereotyping — let me finish — black congressman, majority black district.
”Earlier this month, Trump personally attacked four minority freshman Democrats – Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts – and told them to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
Mulvaney compared Trump’s comments to those of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who he said attacked the congresswomen and “a few days later, the left and many members of the media … came to Nancy’s defense: How it couldn’t possibly be racist, that she was simply attacking their ideas.”
Trump was doing the same, Mulvaney said. “It has absolutely zero to do with race.”
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine