Two Kevins stood on the front steps of a fading terraced house in West Baltimore, killing time on a hot Monday afternoon. Asked about Donald Trump’s racist tweets about the city, they did not mince words.

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“Tell his bitch ass to come down here and give some people some jobs, because he never had to live in no poverty-type situation,” said Kevin Johnson, 26, a mechanic.

The other Kevin, 25, who survived being shot in 2012 and preferred not to give his last name, added: “Trump uses Twitter to try to bring everybody down. If you really care, come and do something. There’s not a rec [recreation centre] in sight. There’s not a pool in sight. The majority of kids are probably at home playing video games. If you want to do something, put some youth programmes in West Baltimore.”

Trump picked another racial scab at the weekend when, triggered by an item on Fox News, he fired off more than a dozen tweets attacking Democratic congressman Elijah Cummings, calling his black majority district “disgusting”, the “worst in the USA”, a “rat and rodent-infested mess,” and a “dangerous and filthy place” where “no human being would want to live”. He was still at it on Monday night, demanding that Cummings, the chairman of the House oversight committee, investigate himself.

Attempts to divide America by race go hand in hand with attempts to divide it by geography. Trump has repeatedly demonised major cities with common characteristics: Democratic leadership, big minority populations and few Trump voters. Baltimore is less than 45 miles from the White House but it is safe to assume he will not be holding a “Make America Great Again rally” there (a rally planned for Chicago in March 2016 was cancelled when scuffles broke out).

Trump told the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in 2016: “This administration has failed America’s inner cities. Every action I take, I will ask myself: does this make better for young Americans in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Detroit, in Ferguson?”

Yet the Trump narrative contains a curious dichotomy. On the one hand, cities are the bastions of liberal elites who look down on “deplorables” in the heartland. On the other, they are the loci of poverty, criminal gangs and illegal immigrants. The president’s son, Eric Trump, told Fox News’s Hannity show on Monday: “You take the top 10 most dangerous cities in America and they’re all controlled by Democrats.”

Either way, Trump appears to position himself as the president of not all Americans but only the voters who queue for hours in small towns and rural areas to attend his race-baiting campaign rallies. This is despite many of them facing the same problems as inner cities: lack of investment, limited transport, dying main streets, the opioid epidemic. Trump once referred to mainly white New Hampshire as “a drug-infested den”.

Baltimore is one of America’s great historic cities. Some areas are prospering with tourism, fine dining and a thriving arts scene. But others are struggling. The population is shrinking. More than one in five people live in poverty. There have been more than 300 murders a year for four consecutive years – the annual toll is now higher than New York, a city 14 times as populous.

He’s been a rich man all his life and he doesn’t understand what it is to be a poor person living in a big city George Foster

Maryland’s seventh congressional district, which Cummings represents, includes affluent suburbs, Johns Hopkins University and the Baltimore Museum of Art as well as West Baltimore, where pavements are cracked, shopkeepers are shielded by bulletproof glass and abandoned terraced houses have boarded up windows and gardens overgrown with weeds.

George Foster, eating chips, apple pie and sweet tea at a local McDonald’s, recalled being mugged for $5 last year. “Most of the crime is drug related,” he said. “It’s an epidemic of drugs. It makes people act irrationally.”

Foster, 68, a retired butcher, suggested Trump is out of touch with the real urban experience. “He’s not living the reality. He’s been a rich man all his life and he doesn’t understand what it is to be a poor person living in a big city with cutbacks, schooling problems. He’s an embarrassment to the country.”

Sitting at a nearby table, Christopher Hill recalled moving from Connecticut, in 2016 and buying a big house at a low price in West Baltimore. “My mother was shocked that I chose to live here but I’m happy to be at the forefront of gentrification.”

But the 53-year-old, an IT professional with a master’s degree, admitted: “It’s very slow coming. The blight problem – abandoned homes – has got out of control. The city has a lot of woes – but what city doesn’t have woes? Washington DC was the murder capital of the world at one time.

“Trump knows that New York had its time looking dingy in the 1980s. Baltimore might be coming late to the party but there is nothing Trump hasn’t seen before. The city has potential and he knows it.”

City-bashing is a politically useful proxy for racism, Hill argued. “The cities Trump is singling out have a high proportion of African Americans. He can hide behind the grey areas and say, ‘That’s not what I meant’, but a person in rural Pennsylvania might just know there’s black people in the city and think they’re the cause of all the death and destruction and what he calls filth.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trump at the White House on Monday. The president lives a cloistered existence in the White House. Photograph: UPI/Barcroft Media

Since becoming president, Trump has avoided city lights and lived a cloistered existence in the White House. He eschews the city’s cultural and sporting events and, unlike Barack Obama, does not make surprise visits to bookshops or restaurants – except when dining at his own Trump International hotel. Weekends are often spent at his golf estates in Bedminster, New Jersey, or his private resort club, Mar-a-Lago, in exclusive Palm Beach, Florida.

The feeling appears to be mutual as electoral maps show swaths of Republican red suburbs and rural areas surrounding densely packed Democratic blue islands.

Few places feel the urban-rural divide more acutely than Baltimore which, though one of America’s poorest cities, is located in America’s richest state. Liz Cornish, the executive director of Bikemore, a local group advocating for bikes and livable streets, said: “Our real problems are with Governor Hogan.”

Four years ago Larry Hogan, a Republican, scrapped a $2.9bn underground railway project. Supporters said it would have been a game-changer for African American communities in poor areas, creating thousands of jobs. Yet Hogan gave $900m back to the federal government while diverting other funds to road projects in largely white, rural parts of Maryland.

“It set public transportation in Baltimore back a lifetime,” added Cornish. “Racism is so much more than coded language. It’s a system that has kept people of colour in, essentially, apartheid.”

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The search for causes of Baltimore’s ills has included local corruption – the mayor quit in disgrace in May – and fraught relations between police and the community. After Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American, died of neck injuries suffered in police custody in 2015, the city erupted in protests and a day of rioting.

Travis Hunt, 36, owner of the downtown Sidebar Tavern, recalled: “During the uprising I saw Elijah Cummings there holding people’s hands. He spoke out against people doing it the wrong way and praised people doing it the right way. That was amazing to see.”

Michael Olesker, 74, a former columnist at the Baltimore Sun newspaper and expert on the city’s history, said: “I’ve never seen a president so divisive, and I lived through Richard Nixon at the height of Vietnam. I’ve never seen a president attack an American city. I’ve never seen a human being, never mind a president, so obsessed with self-interest.”

Back in West Baltimore, a letter courier who was born and raised here was contemplating quitting the city and retiring to Orlando in Florida. “It’s like Michelle Obama said, ‘They go low, we go high’,” said the 53-year-old, who asked to be called Miss Priscilla. “Later on in years, Trump will reap everything he sows. But it’s my duty to pray for him. He’s still my president.”