CNN host Van Jones claimed Sunday that President Donald Trump’s tweets attacking Democratic Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings are proof that he’s “failing kindergarten.”
Jones, during a panel discussion on CNN’s “State of the Union,” argued that anyone who talked about other people the way the president spoke about Cummings and his home district in Baltimore would be taken out of the kindergarten classroom and made to sit in the hallway.
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“First of all, the president is failing kindergarten at this point,” Jones began. “A kindergartener would be taken out of the classroom for talking to and about people the way the president has talked about them.”
Jones went on to say that, if the president had limited his comments to policy problems, there might have been room to criticize Cummings and Baltimore.
“I don’t think the Republicans can get out of it this time. Let’s be fair. If the president said, all right, you don’t like the border, clean up your back yard. That is fair,” Jones conceded. “He went beyond that and said no human being would want to live in Baltimore. That is so beyond the pale because it resonates in the idea you are sub-human if you live there.” (RELATED: Elijah Cummings Fires Back At Trump Over Tweets Calling His District ‘Rodent Infested’)
Host Jake Tapper jumped in, adding that The Baltimore Sun had also weighed in on the president’s tweets.
“The Baltimore Sun is liberal and democratic and they had a scathing op-ed about this — these Tweets,” Tapper noted. “Quote, we would above all remind Mr. Trump that the seventh district of Baltimore is part of the United States and that he is supposedly governing and the White House has far more power to effect change in the city for good or ill than any member of Congress including Mr. Cummings, and better to have vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.”
The president’s tweets criticized Cummings’ home district, calling the city of Baltimore “rodent infested” and raising the ire of many critics who called the tweets “racist.”