President Trump ripped the Rev. Al Sharpton early Monday amid a controversy over the president’s attacks on House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Baltimore, saying the civil rights activist and MSNBC host “hates whites & cops.”
“I have known Al for 25 years. Went to fights with him & Don King, always got along well. He ‘loved Trump!’ He would ask me for favors often,” Trump tweeted in response to a post from Sharpton indicating he was traveling to Baltimore.
“Al is a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score. Just doing his thing. Must have intimidated Comcast/NBC,” he added. “Hates Whites & Cops!”
“Al Sharpton would always ask me to go to his events. He would say, ‘it’s a personal favor to me.’ Seldom, but sometimes, I would go. It was fine. He came to my office in T.T. during the presidential campaign to apologize for the way he was talking about me. Just a conman at work!” Trump added in a subsequent tweet.
Sharpton, who often weighs in on the Democratic Party and has met with several 2020 presidential candidates, responded with a 2006 photo, saying Trump had a “different tune” then.
{mosads}Sharpton has previously criticized Trump over some of the president’s comments regarding race and questioned a visit Trump made earlier this year to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., publicly asking why it was made in “secret.”
The exchange comes after Trump on Saturday and Sunday sent more than a dozen tweets assailing Cummings, a top African American Democratic lawmaker, and parts of the majority-black district he represents.
The president started the weekend by describing Baltimore and surrounding areas as a “very dangerous & filthy place” where “no human being would want to live,” and ended it by calling Cummings — the son of sharecroppers in South Carolina — a “racist.”
Trump on Monday said Baltimore “has the worst Crime Statistics in the Nation” under Cummings’s leadership.
“25 years of all talk, no action! So tired of listening to the same old Bull…Next, Reverend Al will show up to complain & protest,” he tweeted. “Nothing will get done for the people in need. Sad!”
Cummings, whose committee has pursued aggressive investigations into the Trump administration, responded to Trump’s initial wave of insults on Saturday morning by rejecting the criticisms of Baltimore.
“Mr. President, I go home to my district daily. Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors,” Cummings tweeted. “It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch. But, it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.”
Democrats have rallied around Cummings to denounce Trump’s tweets as racist and condemn his attacks on the nation’s 30th-largest city.
Trump sparked similar accusations of racism when he recently targeted a group of minority congresswomen: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.).
Updated at 7:48 a.m.