Sanders Accuses Trump of Lying for Quoting His ‘Third World Country’ Remarks on Baltimore

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) accused President Trump of lying Monday for quoting his 2015 remarks on West Baltimore, in which he compared the area to a “Third World country.”

“Trump’s lies and racism never end. While I have been fighting to lift the people of Baltimore and elsewhere out of poverty with good paying jobs, housing and health care, he has been attacking workers and the poor,” Sanders wrote in response to Trump.

The president attempted to demonstrate the left’s hypocrisy in a pair of tweets Monday morning, quoting Sanders’ 2015 assessment of the poverty-stricken area.

“Crazy Bernie Sanders recently equated the City of Baltimore to a THIRD WORLD COUNTRY!” he exclaimed. “Based on that statement, I assume that Bernie must now be labeled a Racist, just as a Republican would if he used that term and standard!”

Despite Sanders’ denial, Trump was not lying. Sanders likened the city – West Baltimore, specifically – to a Third World country during a visit.

As the Baltimore Sun reported in 2015 (emphasis added):

The independent senator, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, walked the streets of Sandtown-Winchester for about 20 minutes, joined by community leaders and a swarm of cameras that mostly blocked his view of boarded rowhomes and crumbling marble steps. A handful of residents joined the spectacle, and occasionally broke out in chants of Gray’s name.

The scene provided dramatic visuals of the economic inequality Sanders has made the center of his campaign, offering a new backdrop from which to argue for a higher minimum wage, tuition-free public college and tougher federal regulations of the nation’s banking sector.

“Anyone who took the walk that we took around this neighborhood would not think you’re in a wealthy nation,” Sanders told reporters later at the Freddie Gray Empowerment Center in Bolton Hill. “You would think that you were in a Third World country.”

The following year, Sanders doubled down.

“Residents of Baltimore’s poorest boroughs have lifespans shorter than people living under dictatorship in North Korea,” Sanders wrote in May 2016. “That is a disgrace.”

Sanders’ tweets came years after the former President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which granted $1.8 billion to the city.