Words matter. Words have the power to hurt or to heal, divide or to unite, to shed truth or to spread falsehood. Words matter, particularly when you are the President of the United States and possess both a bully pulpit and a magnified microphone.

Demeaning and denigrating his opponents is nothing new for President Trump, but he crossed into ever more alarming and dangerous territory this past week when he sought to demonize and dehumanize an entire city with his tweet storm assault on Congressman Elijah Cummings, calling his district in West Baltimore a “dangerous and filthy place” and a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”

This is not the first time Trump has used references to rats, vermin, and infestation. As Ben Zimmer documented in Politico, Trump has attacked Rep. John Lewis’ Atlanta district, called it “crime infested,” has said that Democrats want “illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our country,” and has said that sanctuary cities involve a “ridiculous, crime infested & breeding concept.” He has also said that we have an “infestation of MS-13 gangs in certain parts of our country.”

Yet, Trump has offered no serious plans or prescriptions for how to improve blighted and struggling neighborhoods or communities such as West Baltimore — only to exploit their struggles to promote his own dystopian, fear-mongering agenda. And indeed, the brutal irony is that to the extent there are struggling neighborhoods in Baltimore, they are largely a result of more than a century of racist and unjust policies explicitly designed to segregate and marginalize people of color.

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