On MSNBC Saturday, Democratic strategist Don Calloway tore into President Donald Trump’s racist attack on Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and his city of Baltimore as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”

“This president is a despicable racist, and I find it difficult that we come on these programs, week after week and hour after hour, we try to find these high minded intellectual terms to describe this president’s activity. There are none. He’s a moron,” said Calloway. “And there’s really nothing that excuses any of the stuff he says or does any further. There’s nothing intellectual about him, and it’s difficult to try to characterize him in these terms that we use.”

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“The one thing we should be beginning to do is call him what he is, a racist, and you have to make that case to show that you can’t normalize him or his behavior,” said Calloway. “He’s an outlier, and he’s a putrid stain on the history of this country. You have to continue to make that case to contextualize him correctly.

“His previous tweet, ‘infestation’ — those are the way[s] that you speak about things that are non-human,” said Calloway. “And in the next sentence, he says, ‘No human would want to live there.’ As you recall several months ago, at the border, he talks about this country being ‘infested’ as he talks about the caravan coming. Black and brown people, he has continued to refer to in these very non-human terms, because the defining characteristic of most racists is that they don’t see the people who they are prejudiced against as actual humans. This is what we continue to see from the president, and it’s not just Baltimore — he said the same things about Frederica Wilson’s district in Florida. He said the same things about the great John Lewis’ district in Atlanta. And now he says this about congressman Elijah Cummings.”

“By the way, Elijah Cummings is such a classy and dignified human being, that he doesn’t say what I’m saying now in response to the president,” added Calloway. “There’s no greater respect than in Elijah Cummings. Which is why you saw the speaker take up for him in her response to the president. Any black or brown member of the United States Congress can expect this same type of stuff coming from the president.”

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