The City of Baltimore remains in the political spotlight as President Donald Trump criticized it Thursday during a rally and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan responded on national television.
“The homicide rate in Baltimore is significantly higher than El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala,” Trump said at his rally in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Trump previously said that Baltimore was a “rat and rodent infested mess.”
Although Hogan called those comments “outrageous and inappropriate,” he said it was important to have a restrained response to the attacks.
“The last thing I need to do is to jump in there and have more angry reaction to the angry reaction,” Hogan told NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers. “I didn’t jump into the mud with everybody else.”
Hogan has been on a comprehensive media tour since he became chairman of the National Governors Association.
“[The voters] want all this nonsense to stop and they want us to just sit down and figure out a way to come up with bipartisan, common sense solutions to the problems that are out there,” Hogan said.
Over the past week, Trump has used Baltimore to attack Maryland U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat who represents that area.
As head of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Cummings is leading multiple investigations of the president’s governmental dealings.
Cummings has also drawn the president’s ire for investigations touching on his family members serving in the White House. His committee voted along party lines to authorize subpoenas for personal emails and texts used for official business by top White House aides, including Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner.
Speaking in television interviews, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Trump was reacting in frustration to the Democrats’ unrelenting investigations and talk of impeachment. He said Trump swung hard at Cummings and his Baltimore district because he believes such Capitol Hill critics are neglecting serious problems back home in their zeal to unfairly undermine his presidency.
“I understand that everything that Donald Trump says is offensive to some people,” Mulvaney said. But he added, “The president is pushing back against what he sees as wrong.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
