Elijah Cummings previously referred to his community of Baltimore as a "drug-infested" area, using a term that President ***** included in a tweet widely panned as a racist attack on the city.
The video, tweeted by the president on Wednesday, showed Cummings lamenting the city's scourge of drugs while speaking during what appeared to be a congressional hearing.
"This morning, I left my community of Baltimore -- a drug-infested area where a lot of the drugs we are talking about today have already taken the lives of so many children," he said. "The same children that I watched 14 or 15 years ago as they grew up, now walking around like zombies."
***** originally called Baltimore a "rat and rodent infested mess," apparently conjuring allusions to racism for some media outlets. CNN's Erin Burnett, for example, accused ***** of feeding his base's "basest tendencies" by using those words to describe a majority-African American city.
Infest has become sort of a trope for *****," she added before pointing to statements about immigrants and inner cities. "Infest is a loaded word throughout history."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., similarly called *****'s tweets "racist," although it's unclear what exactly she was referring to in the tweets.
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