The House Republican retreat is scheduled to take place in Baltimore — thesame city in Maryland that President Donald Trump denigrated over the weekend as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” while writing that “no human being would want to live there.”
House Republican leadership announced in April that their annual retreat would take place September 12-14 in Baltimore, months before the President went on a Twitter tirade against Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings and his district.
It is common for the President to speak at their party’s annual congressional retreat. Last year, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence both spoke at the GOP gathering, which was hosted in West Virginia.
The Washington Post first reported the retreat would be held in Baltimore.
The office of Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the House Republican conference chair, did not immediately return CNN’s request for comment. The House Republican Conference handles the retreat planning in conjunction with the nonprofit Congressional Institute.
Trump attacked Baltimore and Cummings, who is the chairman of the House Oversight Committee and represents Maryland’s 7th Congressional District, after the congressman erupted at acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan over border conditions during a congressional hearing on July 18.
The President suggested in a number of tweets that conditions in Cummings’ district, which is majority black and includes parts of Baltimore, are “FAR WORSE and more dangerous” than those at the US-Mexico border.
“Mr. President, I go home to my district daily,” Cummings wrote on Twitter Saturday in response. “Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors. It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch. But, it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.”
Trump’s attack on Cummings was the latest verbal assault against a minority member of Congress. Earlier this month, Trump — in racist language that was later condemned by a House resolution — told four progressive Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” and “fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
The Republican retreat was originally scheduled to take place in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in late January, but party leaders postponed it because of the then-pending government shutdown. Democrats also postponed their winter retreat, which took place in April.
