Yes, the conversation about Baltimore and Trump’s condemnation of the city to show the ineffectiveness of it representative, Elijah Cummings, shows how well Trump’s rhetoric works, how well it works to suck up the attention that should be given to real problems facing real people in the United States of America where, amidst great wealth, there really are people living in places where conditions are such that no sensible people would choose to live in them. In a scary way, Trump has people who otherwise would not do so defending such places and such conditions making it seem that living in such places and under such conditions is simply a choice some people make. It is not. Few choose poverty and few choose to live in neighborhoods where poverty and despair lead to the kind of ugliness with which residents are forced to cope.
Until Trump spoke to mention Baltimore to get at Mr. Cummings, a good many of those now defending Baltimore would condemn Baltimore for its political system that has for years been working to make ever more stark the division of the city into pockets of great wealth and neighborhoods of poverty and neglect. Urban renewal has meant, as it does in so many places, great amounts of effort being made to make those with money ever more comfortable and those without with less than they had before, the decent life ever more unaffordable to those who do not and never have had much, enough.
Trump should not be allowed to divert attention from that real and terribly destructive aspect of American life, the gap that exists between rich and poor and the reality that poverty forces certain people to live. He is confusing issues and the response from those who should not be taken in is very much the one he wants it to be. Get a grip people!
