Donald Trump’s racist attack on Elijah Cummings just took a scary turn [updated]

| 9:09 am EDT August 2, 2019
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Update: new details reveal that that burglary actually took place 3.5 hours before Donald Trump began his Twitter tirade about Elijah Cummings, at a time when the burglary hadn’t yet been reported. This actually makes the whole thing even more disconcerting.

Donald Trump has spent the past week tweeting one dishonest and racist attack after another on House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings and his hometown of Baltimore. This kind of brinksmanship – particularly coming from a guy whose support base includes white supremacists and violently deranged lunatics – was bound to take an ugly real-world turn. Sure enough, it just did.

Someone broke into Elijah Cummings’ home this past week, according to CBS Baltimore. While they’re not willing to say it, we will: given the timing, there’s little doubt that this break-in was the result of Trump’s attacks on Cummings. Further to that point, CBS says that Cummings’ neighbor was “shocked” to hear about the break-in, which makes clear that this kind of thing doesn’t tend to happen at random on Cummings’ block.

What’s particularly alarming is that while Elijah Cummings is in Washington DC much of the time for obvious reasons, he was in fact in Baltimore for part of this week, meeting with his constituents. In other words, this break-in could have gone horribly wrong. Sure, this could have merely been some pro-Trump hooligans who wanted to be able to brag that they pulled it off and weren’t intending to do anything violent, but Trump nonetheless put Cummings’ safety in danger – and it’s not the first time he’s done this kind of thing.

Donald Trump has also been hurling dishonest racist attacks at four nonwhite Democratic Congresswomen, telling them to “go back” where they came from, and that if they have complaints about the way he’s running the United States, “you can leave.” This not so thinly veiled violent rhetoric is yet another reason why Trump needs to be impeached.