As Washington, D.C., grapples with President Donald Trump‘s federal takeover, the U.S. capital’s neighboring Baltimore City mayor is calling out what he sees as a clear racial lens in how the White House and the Republican Party view predominantly Black and brown cities.
“It’s very notable that each and every one of the cities called out by the president has a Black mayor,” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott told CNN’s Laura Coates Monday night.
Earlier that day, Trump held a press conference at the White House to announce that he was deploying the D.C. National Guard to the streets of D.C. to reduce incidents of crime.
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, globing mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people, and we’re not going to let it happen anymore,” said Trump.
The president also mentioned other cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Baltimore, that he claimed were experiencing high rates of crime. “They’re so far gone,” he said.
Mayor Scott pushed back against Trump’s characterization of cities led by Black mayors, telling CNN, “Most of those cities are seeing historic lows in violent crime.”
In Baltimore, the mayor said the city has seen a 50-year low in homicides. He credited the city’s success to a holistic public policy that goes beyond Trump’s law-and-order approach.
“Maybe we are too far gone,” Scott said in response to Trump, adding, “Too far gone from the broken right-wing policies of zero-tolerance policing and all the things that did not make our city safer for all those many years.”
Scott continued, “We know that having the military there is not the way to do it. The way to drive down violence in cities has been proven. Mayors across the country have brought together law enforcement, the legal community, the actual community, community violence intervention work to reduce violence across this country and cities to lows that we have not seen in decades.”
Rather than insult them, the Baltimore mayor said Trump could “learn a lot from us.”
“We’re safer than we have been in decades, in my lifetime, in most cities,” explained the two-term 41-year-old mayor. “That’s something that each of these mayors should stand on [and] something the president should be coming to work alongside them to continue that partnership.”
Instead of working with mayors on the things that are working to reduce crime to historic lows, Scott said Trump is instead “dog whistling through right-wing propaganda and, quite frankly, racist viewpoints that [Republicans] have about these cities, and trying to convince the American people that what they know is not true.”
Like most of President Trump’s critics, Mayor Scott suggested that his escalation of federal force in D.C.—and the threats to other cities led by Black officials—is really a distraction from his political weaknesses.
“We all know this is a distraction. The president does not want the American people to hear him answer questions about the economy or the Epstein files,” he said.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson echoed the notion that Trump is deflecting from the troubles facing his administration.
“There’s no emergency in D.C., so why would he deploy the National Guard? To distract us from his alleged inclusion in the Epstein files? To rid the city of unhoused people? D.C. has the right to govern itself. It doesn’t need this federal coup,” Johnson said in a statement. “This president campaigned on ‘law and order,’ but he is the president of chaos and corruption.”
