PETE HEGSETH (CO-HOST): You know, this is a feud back and forth which of course Nancy Pelosi and others, as they've done in the past, always will say, 'Well President Trump is a racist. This is what, he's making this about race.'
When, if you step back and look at the conditions in West Baltimore, I'm not from there but I know folks from there, you saw that report there, whether it's education rates, whether it’s crime rates, it's a systemic culture of poverty that’s trapped a lot of people there who feel like they're left behind. You talk about forgotten men and women, it's the men and women there who deserve the same choice and opportunities that anyone in America does. And that's the critique President Trump made in the campaign, that I think he’s making here as well. If you've represented that district ten, 20 years, I don’t know exactly how long it’s been and you're not doing everything outside of the box to make it better there, are you doing enough?
GRIFF JENKINS (CO-HOST): So Elijah Cummings’ congressional district, The 7th in Maryland, is a large district. It has Baltimore, parts of West Baltimore and above it. To be clear, we're not talking specifically just about Baltimore but that is his area, West Baltimore is a part of it. It got thrust into the national conversation in the wake of the Freddie Gray riots that we saw in 2015. But if you look today, the homicide rate is up 18 percent, alright, compared to last year. You have 184 homicides so far this year compared to 156 last year. That’s the 18 percent increase. If you look at nonfatal shootings in Baltimore from 2018 to 2019, you have a 31 percent increase and perhaps some of what [Inaudible] years on that Mark referenced was showing are some of the harshest hit areas. And you know, unfortunately,West Baltimore has challenges, the same challenges that we saw four years ago.
