‘Looking for a reason to attack’: How Trump seized on a Fox News broadcast to go after Cummings

President Trump was already seething about Rep. Elijah E. Cummings.

He was frustrated that the oversight committee Cummings (D-Md.) chairs authorized a subpoena last week that could sweep up emails from his daughter and son-in-law. He was annoyed that Cummings stood alongside Democratic leaders discussing the possibility of impeachment following testimony by the former special counsel.

And he was particularly incensed when the longtime Democratic lawmaker lambasted Trump’s acting head of Homeland Security over reports from the border of “a child is sitting in their own feces, can’t take a shower.”

“None of us would have our children in that position,” Cummings said during a hearing earlier this month. “They are human beings.”

Trump, one senior White House official said, “was looking for a reason to attack.”

For Trump, that reason came shortly after 6 a.m. Saturday morning, when Kimberly Klacik, a Baltimore area Republican who is black, appeared on “Fox & Friends” talking about video footage she had taken depicting Cummings’s district as overrun by trash and blight.

Evangelist Alveda King speaks to reporters outside the White House Monday after meeting with President Trump. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Almost exactly an hour later, the president weighed in with tweets calling Cummings’s district “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” saying that “no human being would want to live there” and dubbing the congressman “a brutal bully.”