President Donald Trump took aim this past weekend at Maryland Representative Elijah Cummings, calling him a “brutal bully” who should concentrate on cleaning up his “disgusting, rat and rodent infested” Baltimore district rather than criticizing U.S. immigration officers. Predictably, Cummings, who is black, called his comments racist. And should we not understand the gravity of Trump’s comments, black CNN anchor Victor Blackwell, indulged us all by crying on air. But both should save their outrage and their tears for something that actually resembles the truth.

Trump was directly over the target when he called Rep. Cummings on the deplorable state of Baltimore—like many other cities under Democratic control— that have become cesspools of crime, unemployment, poverty and illiteracy. And he is also accurate when he said Baltimore is infested with rats. A documentary titled the “Rat Film” debuted in September 2017 and highlighted Baltimore’s rat warfare and urban planning failures.

CNN’s Blackwell, would have done the citizens of Baltimore a higher service by reporting on the facts of Baltimore rather than manipulating his audience with faux tears. Democrats have run the city of Baltimore, the unions, the schools and the police force for decades. Since 1969, there have been only two Republican governors of the State of Maryland. Elijah Cummings has represented Baltimore in the U.S. Congress for more than 30 years. The current mayor, Bernard C. “Jack” Young, served from 2010 to 2019 as the President of the Baltimore City Council and 14 years as a District Councilman. Mayor Young’s long tenure in local politics makes him just the latest player in Baltimore’s long-running Democrat problem.

According to a report in Breitbart, “Every single member of the Baltimore city council is a Democrat. Liberalism and all the toxic government dependence and cronyism and union corruption and failed schools that comes along with it, has run amok in Baltimore for a half-century, and that is Baltimore’s problem. It is the free people of Baltimore who elect and then re-elect those who institute policies that have so spectacularly failed that once-great city.”

Black Lives Matter, Elijah Cummings, and the Democrats don’t care about the black lives in Baltimore. In fact, the Democratic despotism of inner city Baltimore is blacks killing blacks without popping off a single round through its failed policies. For example, following the death of Freddy Gray in 2015, Black Lives Matter activists and Baltimore city officials demanded a lighter police presence in patrolling Baltimore’s mostly black neighborhoods. Since then, the murder rate in Baltimore has descended into what amounts to a concrete jungle.

At the close of the third quarter of 2017, city data showed that Baltimore crime rose almost across the board. Violent crime rose 15 percent compared to the same period of last year. Police reported about 9,100 violent crimes through September, or 1,160 more than during the same period for the previous year. Reverend Kinji Scott, a Baltimore activist, blamed city hall for leaving the neighborhoods unprotected and blames the increase in crime squarely were it belongs—with Baltimore’s liberal politicians and the liberal media.

In an interview with NPR, Scott denies that Baltimore citizens ever wanted less protection and points his finger at the progressive left as the cause for the decrease in police presence: “No. That represented our progressives, our activists, our liberal journalists, our politicians, but it did not represent the overall community. Because we know for a fact that around the time Freddie Gray was killed, we started to see homicides increase. We had five homicides in that neighborhood while we were protesting.”

If Cummings and other Democrats cared about the black lives they represent, they’d focus on cleaning up the morally bankrupt landscape of broken black families, where 72 percent of black children are raised in single households and one out of every six black men is in jail. Black Lives Matter should care that 93 percent of black homicides are black-on-black crimes according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice.

Cummings and other Democrats that serve Baltimore should care that black children in Baltimore schools cannot read at grade level and often don’t graduate. In 2013, according to the Department of Education, only 16 percent of the eighth graders in the Baltimore City public schools scored at or above grade-level proficient in the NAEP reading test. That same year, only 13 percent of the eighth graders scored at or above grade-level proficient in math.

In January 2018, Baltimore City schools shuttered their doors during a brutal cold snap that swallowed the Mid-Atlantic because they were without heat. Predictably, the lack of funds was blamed on the fact that the children are black and brown. City school CEO Sonja Santelises said when addressing the problem, “We also need to go a level deeper and see all of the levers that are impacting the state of education for black and brown children. There is a history of underfunding.”

But in the 2010-2011 school year, the last year I was able to find data for, Baltimore City received more than $17,000 per student. Hardly insufficient funds. Baltimore City’s schools are notorious for their corruption, and according to City Lab, “The school system’s lack of capacity—the know-how to manage repair and maintenance contracts for a large, complex, and aging school system—is a saga that dates back decades. Between 2004 and 2008, 11 city school maintenance and facilities employees—including the head of facilities management—were criminally convicted in a corruption scheme that had operated since at least 1991.” Millions of dollars in boiler repairs, window upgrades, and other critical work was paid for, verified, and inspected—but not done.

Nearby Philadelphia is also suffering under Democratic leadership with Democrats controlling the city since 1950. Philadelphia’s city council is made up of 17 members, 14 of whom are Democrats. One Republican, Brian O’Neill, has held his 10th district spot in Northeast Philadelphia for 36 years. The other two Republicans were elected as at-large members and have a spot only because the City Charter requires two at-large seats on Council to be held by the minority party.

The results are predictable. Uncontrollable high crime and the perpetuation of poor schools and employment prospects for inner city blacks. Consider the recent headlines coming out of Philadelphia just last month. A group of black teens swarmed a Walgreens on South Street where they vandalized the store, terrorized a clerk and looted. Less than a week later, it happened again at another business. But Philly’s flash mobs are not a recent phenomena or one that is particular to Philadelphia. In 2010, Newser reported: “Philadelphia’s top cop warned teenagers that they can go to jail for joining texted ‘flash mobs’ in which groups of rampaging teens attack property and passers-by. Hundreds of rowdy teenagers, organized by email or text message, have gathered in downtown Philly on recent weekends and the police plan to increase manpower and tighten curfews in response, the New York Times reports.”

Former Mayor Michael A. Nutter told marauding black youths in 2011, “You have damaged your own race,” before imposing a tougher curfew in response to the flash mobs. Nutter, the city’s third black mayor, said in a much maligned lecture aimed at black teens, “Put those God-darn hoodies down, especially in the summer. Pull your pants up and buy a belt ‘cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.” And just as the media melted faster than an ice cube on a hot Baltimore day, the press attacked Nutter as they are now attacking Trump’s common sense tweets about Cummings deplorable district.

According to Temple News, “More than 20 percent of Philadelphia adults lack basic literacy skills. Young people who cannot read or perform math at the most basic level will not thrive in a technology-based economy. Poor performance in education sentences an entire underclass to increased unemployment, poverty, crime and homelessness.”

Like Muslims in Europe, black separatism pushed by groups such as Black Lives Matter have served only to ratchet up the divide and create no-go zones in American cities controlled by Democrat rule. In my article, Black Lives Do Matter, I reported on the culture of black violence in schools and how liberal progressives use the black community to push forward the same failed government policies and agendas that have been repeatedly shown not to work. They are literally keeping blacks in poverty and perpetuating a victim class by using race as bait.

Baltimore will remain a concrete jungle infested with rats as long as the liberal media and Democratic politicians like Cummings are more concerned with lining their own pockets and keeping blacks voting for their party. And citizens that want a better Baltimore must begin by being honest enough to admit that the problems they face in their community have been perpetuated by a permanent Democrat ruling class that control every aspect of the city.

Republicans have long abandoned inner cities because of the permanent ruling class of Democrats and crime. When they do take back areas of cities, they are accused by the left of gentrifying and pushing out poorer city residents by increasing real estate values. There’s a better way, but as long as the media continues to stoke racism, such as when they twist Trump’s tweets to be racist when they are clearly not, the problems will remain unsolved. #Reignwell