Friday on “Fox & Friends,” Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson weighed in on the controversy surrounding Baltimore, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and President Donald Trump after Trump called it “rat and rodent-infested” on Twitter.
Carson agreed with Trump’s assertion about Baltimore, saying everyone “needs to acknowledge it is a ‘problem,'” and he added that the outrage over his remarks is coming from people upset he is trying to hold people responsible.
“[T]he first thing we have to do is acknowledge that it’s a problem. Everybody needs to acknowledge that,” Carson stated. “And, you know, we have gotten to a situation in our country now where when you hold people responsible, you know, they don’t like it, they call you a racist.”
He continued, It kind of reminds you, if you have children, you are raising them, and you have one that chronically doesn’t carry out their chores, do their responsible thing, and you call them out for it, and they say, ‘You like him better than you like me.’ Basically, the same kind of thing that’s going on here. And instead of doing that, you know, people need to be willing to work together.”
The 2016 presidential candidate described a recent trip he made to Baltimore in which he saw a lot of “squalor” that had resulted in citizens “suffering.”
“The people are the ones who are suffering when we have squalor there,” he told “Fox & Friends,” adding he wants to help get Baltimore cleaned up while also assisting young men in getting employed and gaining skills to “move up the economic ladder.”
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