Moore, railing against Trump’s insults of city, invites president to Baltimore for public safety walk

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Gov. Wes Moore on Thursday invited President Donald Trump to attend a “public safety walk” through Baltimore and continued to rail against the president’s recent insults of Baltimore and of Moore.

In a letter to Trump, Moore invited the president to attend the city’s September public safety walk, in which a crowd of elected officials, community advocates and media members walk through neighborhoods with the highest incidences of violent crime.

The governor recently made the rounds on the network news circuit to denounce Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard in Washington, D.C., a city with declining crime numbers, and his description of Baltimore and several other cities as crime-ridden and “so far gone.”

Baltimore has seen historic drops in crime, according to the city’s crime dashboard, and it’s on track to have the lowest number of homicides in a year since the government began keeping official crime statistics, according to the governor’s office.

Moore’s rebukes of Trump’s policies and remarks clearly caught the president’s eye. Speaking to reporters recently in the Oval Office, he called Moore a “character” and said that the governor, whom political insiders and commentators frequently mention as a potential 2028 presidential candidate, is “not presidential timber at all.”

In his Thursday letter to the president, Moore wrote, “Last week, you responded to my concerns about the deployment of National Guard personnel for municipal policing in Washington, D.C. by insulting me personally from the Oval Office.

“So I wanted to write in order to clarify the root of my frustration and extend an invitation for you to visit Maryland, where we can discuss strategies for effective public safety policy,” he wrote.

Moore wrote that state and local communities have continued to invest in strategies to make neighborhoods safer, even as the Trump administration has cut millions of dollars in federal funding for violence intervention and gun violence prevention.

The governor’s invitation followed a morning event commemorating demolition work to redevelop Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore.

As part of the prepared remarks he delivered at the event, Moore called on the president to “keep our name out of your mouth” if he’s unwilling to visit and invest in Baltimore.

In response to Moore’s comments, the Maryland Freedom Caucus, which comprises lawmakers who align with the president, mocked Moore and said he was doing “his best Will Smith impression this morning,” appearing to reference the actor’s comments to Chris Rock (about keeping the name of Smith’s wife, Baltimore-native Jada Pinkett Smith, out of his mouth) after slapping the comedian during the Academy Awards in 2022.