BALTIMORE — The last time Donald J. Trump blamed a black man for the condition of this undoubtedly troubled city, the year was 2015, the death of Freddie Gray in police custody had spawned a racial uprising, and the black man in question was President Barack Obama.
“Our great African American president hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!” Mr. Trump wrote then on Twitter.
Now Mr. Trump is president himself, and he has written off this entire city as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested” place where “no human being would want to live,” and is blaming its longtime and revered congressman, Representative Elijah E. Cummings, for the city’s problems. But people here say that even if their city has its struggles, Mr. Trump has lost his right to point them out.
“This is the struggle that he doesn’t know anything about,” the Rev. Timmie Lee, from the Cornerstone Christian Community Church, said as he stopped by a street stand he operates in West Baltimore, where his son Isaiah, 12, was helping sell sneakers and soap. “If he was raised up in this community, if he had any dealings with this community, then he can speak to this community. Elijah Cummings is here. He walks through this community. He lives in this community.”
Mr. Trump’s weekend tweetstorm assailing the congressman — which continued into Monday with an attack on the Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights leader who was in Baltimore for a conference on the black economic agenda — reverberated throughout this long-suffering city, whose troubles predated the Freddie Gray uprising. City leaders and residents are furious but not entirely surprised that a president who seems intent on exploiting racial and cultural tensions as a path to re-election in 2020 would train his fire on Baltimore.
On Monday, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland belatedly weighed in after absorbing criticism for an initially tepid response to the president’s comments. He called Mr. Trump’s attacks “outrageous and inappropriate,” though Mr. Hogan — a Republican who was once considered a possible primary race challenger to Mr. Trump — avoided going after the president by name. Instead, he issued a broad criticism of the dysfunction of Washington.
City leaders were more pointed.
“No one in Baltimore is surprised that the president is attacking Baltimore,” the City Council president, Brandon M. Scott, said in an interview on Monday morning. “I think that this president is someone who’s trying to get re-elected off us. So he is going to try to rally his base. He’s trying to stoke fears, racial biases — and he is trying to pull the worst out of American society in order to get re-elected.”
Residents were more pointed still.
“Trump is a buffoon. He looks at this as an African-American community, and that’s all he sees. That’s where his narrow mind is,” said John Cheatham, 66, who said he covers murder trials for a local radio station, adding, “If you had a Mount Rushmore of hate, he would be on it.”
It is not news to anyone here that Baltimore, which is 63 percent black, is struggling with long-term systemic problems and unstable political leadership. It has gone through five police commissioners in the past five years, and its crime rate is out of control: The city has recorded at least 33 more homicides this year than New York, despite being about one-fourteenth the size. The mayor who presided during the unrest did not run for re-election, and her successor was forced to resign amid a corruption scandal.
The city is confronting joblessness, homelessness, blocks of vacant housing, crushing poverty and a huge wealth gap. According to Lawrence Brown, an associate professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore, the median annual income for white families in the city is roughly $76,000, while the median income for black families is $36,000. But those problems have much more to do with a long history of housing segregation — mandated by law in the early 1900s — than with any one politician, city and community leaders say.
And if Mr. Trump wanted to do something about it, he has the power, through his Department of Housing and Urban Development, and his housing secretary, Ben Carson, who was a prominent surgeon in Baltimore for much of his life.
Candidate Trump promised repeatedly to fix the problems of urban America. President Trump appears determined to use it as a political foil.
“If he were out here helping people, it would be one thing,” said Tyra Reeder, 18, who was giving away cellphones as part of a government program to help the poor, outside a CVS Pharmacy that was looted and burned during the unrest of 2015. “But if he’s just watching from Trump Tower, drinking out of his $10,000 cup, then he can’t say anything about Baltimore to me.”
Professor Brown put it this way: “He’s the president of the United States. The last time I checked, Baltimore is part of the United States. So if there is blame that needs to go around, that includes everybody — from the governor on down, and of course the president.”
Baltimore is in some ways two cities — one black and one white. It is also a collection of neighborhoods: The West Baltimore of Mr. Trump’s imagination is just one corner of a city that also boasts a bustling harbor; new investment along the waterfront; and hip commercial strips like 36th Street, known as “The Avenue,” in Hampden, where rainbow flags fly from storefronts and Casey Hunt, a 24-year-old chemist, was sipping a National Bohemian — the local beer known as “Natty Boh” — on Monday afternoon at the Cafe Hon. (In Baltimore, waitresses always call the customers “Hon.”)
“A lot of people like to talk” badly about Baltimore, she said, “but they’ve never been here.”
In the Druid Heights neighborhood of West Baltimore on Monday, Kevin Brown, 55, was tending a garden where an empty lot used to be — two blocks from where Mr. Cummings lives — against the backdrop of a colorful mural painted on the brick wall of a historic home. The owner had planted it in an effort to beautify the neighborhood.
“Everybody here helps each other,” Mr. Brown said, adding that that is something Mr. Trump knows little about.
Throughout the city, there was a sense of real pain. Baltimore is accustomed to being painted as downtrodden and falling apart; whenever anything bad happens, people here say, the national media swoops in, scaring away tourists and investors. Now the president of the United States is reinforcing that perception on his Twitter feed.
“People tend to hear these hurtful words and internalize it,” said the Rev. Cleveland T. A. Mason, a Baptist minister who was meeting with faith leaders on Monday at the New Shiloh Baptist Church, where Freddie Gray was eulogized four years ago. “These things that are being said by the president of the United States are more hurtful because of who he is.”
City boosters are pushing back. On Monday, after the hashtag #WeAreBaltimore started trending on Twitter, a website by that name — already in the works before Trump’s tweets — went live earlier than planned. “We are more than alright,” its home page says.
Mr. Cummings — a son of South Carolina sharecroppers who moved to Baltimore to be preachers — has represented Baltimore for more than 20 years. After the 2015 unrest, he went onto the streets of West Baltimore, where he lives, to try to keep the peace. His district also includes some white suburbs, and in 2018, he won re-election with 76 percent of the vote.
As chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, a role that gives him the authority to investigate the president, he is a powerful and vocal critic of Mr. Trump. In Baltimore, Mr. Cummings is revered; the president, by contrast, is reviled. Mr. Trump took just 10 percent of the vote in Baltimore in 2016.
In West Baltimore, the kerfuffle around Mr. Trump’s tweets was tempered by an acknowledgment that any criticism of Charm City was going to have some truth to it.
On a street corner a few blocks from the Penn-North metro station, where the CVS drugstore has been rebuilt and two police cars sat on the plaza, Isaiah Lee was helping his uncle at the street stand in a vacant lot strewn with trash.
“Look at where we live at,” Isaiah said. “I mean, Baltimore may be not that great, but Baltimore is not what you think it is.”