Trump on Saturday suggested conditions in Cummings’ district, which is majority black and includes parts of Baltimore, are “FAR WORSE and more dangerous” than those at the US-Mexico border. He continued his attacks into Sunday, tweeting that “Elijah Cummings has failed badly!” also taking aim at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district. Pelosi previously condemned Trump’s tweets on Cummings as racist attacks.
Cummings, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, responded on Twitter Saturday by saying, “Mr. President, I go home to my district daily. Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors. It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch. But, it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.”
Sanders called Cummings “one of the most decent and outstanding members of the House of Representatives.”
On “State of the Union” later Sunday, Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib told Tapper that Trump “has a hate agenda.”
Tlaib — one of the four minority congresswomen previously attacked by Trump — added that the President “doesn’t have a policy agenda, and that’s what he falls down on.”
“This hate agenda is now seeping into policy making,” she said, citing deregulations in the US Environmental Protection Agency. The lawmaker said she hears “constantly” from her constituents, who say, “We have a right to breathe clean air, there’s something going on here, we don’t feel like our government is protecting us.”
The President, Mulvaney said on “Fox News Sunday,” was going after Cummings over the Democrat’s statements about the situation at the southern border, adding: “It has absolutely zero to do with race.”
CNN’s Sarah Westwood and Veronica Stracqualursi contributed to this report.