“Really bad news! The Baltimore house of Elijah Cummings was robbed. Too bad!” the president tweeted. | John Minchillo/AP Photo white house 'Too bad!': Trump seizes on Cummings burglary amid Baltimore attacks

President Donald Trump weighed in Friday on a burglary at Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings’ home in Baltimore, which the president has relentlessly attacked for several days as squalid and poorly managed.

“Really bad news! The Baltimore house of Elijah Cummings was robbed. Too bad!” he tweeted.


Cummings’ house was broken into early Saturday, a few hours before Trump began a social media tirade against the lawmaker and his hometown. Police are still investigating the incident and do not yet know whether any property was taken, according to a Baltimore TV station.

Cummings told The Baltimore Sun in a statement Friday he "was notified of the intrusion by my security system, and I scared the intruder away by yelling before the person gained entry into the residential portion of the house."

The president Saturday morning described Cummings on Twitter as “a brutal bully” and characterized his predominantly black, Baltimore-based congressional district as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being” would want to live.

Those criticisms, condemned by many national Democrats as racist, kicked off a week of heated rhetoric aimed at Baltimore and Cummings, who chairs the powerful House Committee on Oversight and Reform and is overseeing numerous investigations into the administration.

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The president, without evidence, alleged the 13-term congressman and other Democratic leaders have “stolen or wasted” billions of dollars in federal aid to Baltimore and claimed Tuesday that black Baltimoreans and African American supporters have thanked him for drawing attention to the city’s living conditions and corruption.

Trump again hammered Baltimore during a campaign rally Thursday evening in Ohio, asserting that its homicide rate is greater than Afghanistan’s. “We’ll check the numbers and if we’re wrong, they will tell us tomorrow,” he said.

Trump's message Friday drew rebukes online from various high-profile Democrats and a handful of Republicans, including Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations. "This is so unnecessary," she wrote online in response to the president.

"This is so beneath the office you hold," added Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.). "It’s childish, and yet it’s getting really old..."

Trump, departing the White House Friday afternoon, insisted he wasn't mocking Cummings.

"The tweet itself was just really a repeat of what I heard over the news. I know his house was robbed. And I thought that was too bad. That was really just — that really was not meant as a wise guy tweet," he told reporters. "I mean, his house was robbed. It came over the news at a certain moment last night, and I had just mentioned it."

Caitlin Oprysko contributed to this report.