Residents of Baltimore are working to showcase the best that their hometown has to offer, just days after President Trump described the city as a "a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess."
Trump's epithets came amid a Twitter tirade against Baltimore's congressional Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), who chairs the House Oversight Committee and has been a staunch critic of the president.
"His district is considered the Worst in the USA," Trump added. "If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place." The president also took a hit at residents of Baltimore.
Cummings dismissed the president's critique, saying in a tweet "each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors."
The city, moreover, has soundly rejected the president's characterization.
"People are furious, of course. People know that Baltimore is not how [Trump] describes it," Greg Tucker, the co-founder of the forthcoming website We Are Baltimore told Cheddar. "Indeed Baltimore has challenges. Indeed Baltimore has suffered years of underinvestment in critical neighborhoods… yet too often Baltimore is characterized solely by our worst elements."
"We Are Baltimore," which was in the works before Trump's tweets, will aggregate stories from residents and thriving local businesses to counter the negative narrative of the city.
It will "provide a definitive platform where we can aggregate and amplify the many positives, the many assets of Baltimore," Tucker added.
In a statement, Baltimore's Mayor Bernard C. Jack Young also slammed the president for using "hurtful and dangerous" rhetoric to "denigrate a vibrant American City."
Trump is "a disappointment to the people of Baltimore, our country, and to the world," Young added.
The president's invocation of rodents and infestations to describe a city that is more than 60 percent black was widely rebuked as using racist terms that have been historically used to demonize minorities.
Civil rights icon Reverend Al Sharpton said from a press conference in Baltimore on Monday that Trump had attacked the city in "the most bigoted and racist way."
"He has a particular venom for blacks and people of color," Sharpton said. "He doesn't refer to any of his other opponents or critics as infested."
Trump said "Democrats always play the Race Card" and criticized Sharpton as a "a con man, a troublemaker" on Twitter ahead of the press conference. He also doubled down early Monday morning on his critique of Cummings, who has represented Maryland's 7th congressional district since 1996. "25 years of all talk, no action!" Trump tweeted.
Several 2020 Democratic presidential candidates including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) — whose campaign is headquartered in Baltimore — condemned Trump's remarks.
Yet the most scathing rebuke came from the Baltimore Sun's editorial board, which wrote "Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one."
Trending on Twitter over the weekend was #TrumpIsARat.
In a statement to Cheddar, Twitter confirmed that Trump's tweets do not violate the platform's rules regarding the use of dehumanizing language.
As the U.S. comes up on the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection.,A.C. Thompson, investigative reporter at ProPublica, joined Cheddar's Baker Machado to discuss updates to American Insurrection by FRONTLINE, ProPublica and Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program. The documentary investigates the attack on the Capitol touched off by the lie that the presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump but with new information gleaned since the event including interviews with lawmakers and law enforcement and the evolution of groups like the Boogaloo Boys and the Proud Boys behind the attack. "In some ways those groups that were kind of the vanguard of January 6 are maybe no longer relevant because their message is everywhere," he said.
A new report from ProPublica and the Washington Post found that Facebook Groups played a major role in the spread of misinformation linked to the January 6 insurrection with more than 650,000 posts claiming that Joe Biden's election victory was illegitimate.
Millions of Americans with young children have relied on the child tax credit since the federal government began issuing checks in July 2021. The last round of payments was sent out just before the Christmas holiday — at the same time as the omicron variant surged. Leah Hamilton, associate professor of social work at Appalachian State University, joined Cheddar to discuss what the end to the tax credit means as the U.S. sees the end of many relief programs and its highest number of COVID cases since the start of the pandemic. "It'll become harder for families to meet their basic needs, increasing national childhood poverty rates and the proportion of families who have difficulty putting food on the table, maintaining stable housing, and paying their bills," Hamilton said. She also pointed to research that the credit as a long-term investment in children offsets claims that it contributes to macroeconomic impacts like inflation.
U.S. President Joe Biden spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over the week-end, just days after he spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The call comes as Washington prepares to meet with Moscow on January 10, as tensions mount over Russia's military build up near its border with Ukraine. Cheddar News speaks with Mustafa Tameez, a former advisor to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, about the issue.
Several Silicon Valley insiders are being accused of contorting a 1990s-era tax break to avoid taxes on millions of dollars of investment profits. The tax break is known as the qualified small business stock exemption, and it allows early investors in certain companies to avoid half of the taxes on up to $10 million in capital gains. A piece recently published in the New York Times says venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz replicated the tax exemption by giving shares of companies to friends and family, who would otherwise face a 23.8% capital gains bill. The CEO of Roblox is also accused of replicating the tax break for his family members at least 12 times. Although the loophole known as 'stacking' is considered to be legal, the Times piece implies that the exemption has been manipulated for the ultra-wealthy to become more wealthy. Greycroft co-founder and Chairman Emeritus Alan Patricof joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
Chris Sommerfeldt, City Hall reporter for the New York Daily News, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he discusses both the wins and losses of Bill de Blasio's eight years as New York City Mayor.
The push to regulate the gig worker economy is gaining steam as the share of workers who participate in freelancing through businesses like Uber and Lyft have also exponentially grown during the pandemic. Employment attorney Mark Kluger, founding partner at Kluger Healey, LLC, joined Cheddar to break down how the battle to reclassify gig workers will continue in the new year, and why the issue continues to generate conflict. "More and more workers are using gig work as their primary source of income and as a result of that they are not like employees in the sense that they don't have benefits like health insurance," Kluger noted.
