CNN political commentator and Democratic strategist David Axelrod slammed President Trump’s attack on Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), arguing the president’s “stream of ugly, divisive bombast” could threaten his reelection chances.
“If @realDonaldTrump loses in 2020, this will be why,” Axelrod wrote Saturday. “Every, single day, he subjects the country he was elected to lead to a stream of ugly, divisive bombast. It’s exhausting. It’s destructive. It’s unworthy of a POTUS.”
Axelrod added that the “rancor and chaos his daily dose of nastiness creates is a barrier to actually getting things done.”
Axelrod was responding to a tweet by Trump on Saturday in which the president called Cummings’s district a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”{mosads}
Trump sought to contrast the district, which includes downtown Baltimore, with conditions at the southern border, calling it “FAR WORSE and more dangerous.”
Cummings, the chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee that has conducted probes into the administration, has called the treatment of migrant children at government facilities near the southern border “government-sponsored child abuse.”
“We have seen cases where the administration has deported parents without their children and still, to this day, have not reunited those families,” Cummings, a frequent Trump critic, said earlier this month.
Trump’s comments about Cummings follow a series of attacks on a group of minority freshman congresswomen this month in which the president said they should “go back” where they came from. The House voted to condemn that remark as racist, though the president has since doubled down.