In an interview on MSNBC’s “The Weeknight,” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said President Donald Trump is “dog-whistling” on the issue of reducing crime in the inner city “to get people to not pay attention to other things.” Scott said the city is “preparing” residents and “letting them know what their rights are” for a possible National Guard deployment. “It’s sad because what we really should be talking about is how this administration could be helping cities like mine and others to take the ball even further, because even with these historic reductions, you don’t hear me or any of the mayors saying, we’ve solved the issue,” Scott said of crime in the city. “We’re saying, we’re acknowledging it and we have to go even further.”

EUGENE DANIELS, CO-HOST:  It started with Los Angeles, then Washington, D.C., and now Donald Trump is threatening to send troops to other blue cities with Black mayors, including Baltimore, which he says needs to, quote, clean up crime. That’s despite the Baltimore mayor’s office providing data showing homicides in the city decreasing by more than 24 percent year over year.  But as we know, this isn’t about the numbers, it’s not about crime.  Here’s what Maryland Governor Wes Moore had to say.   (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)   GOV. WES MOORE (D), MARYLAND:  Donald Trump, if you are not willing to walk our communities, keep our name out of your mouth.     (END VIDEO CLIP)   DANIELS:  Well, while all of this is going on, today, bizarrely, Trump tried to claim that Governor Moore secretly loves him.     (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)   DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES:  I met him at the Army-Navy game.  They said, oh, there’s Governor Moore, he’d love to see you.  He came over to me.  He hugged me, shook my hand.  You were there.  He said, sir, you’re the greatest president in my lifetime.     (END VIDEO CLIP)   DANIELS:  To which the governor responded, lol.     Joining us now is Brandon Scott, the Democratic mayor of Baltimore.     MICHAEL STEELE, CO-HOST:  So, OK, that’s how you know it’s bad.  I understand — Mayor, welcome.  But wait a minute, Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland, went up to Donald Trump and said, you are the greatest president in my lifetime?  What, was he born 15 minutes before that meeting?  I mean, this is — this is the level of — of disinformation and disruption of the intelligence of individuals that you see every day.     Your city is now the next in the crosshairs, along with a number of other cities that are being run by Black mayors.  What is — what is the collective response?  Because you — you know what it is to run a city.  You know what it is to deal with the crime statistics.  You know what it is to deal with the health and economy statistics in your city as a part of a state.  And all of that plays into the numbers.  So is there — is this going to be a fight that’s solely on the ground of trying to prove or disprove the numbers, or is this a fight that’s a little bit bigger than that, that goes to the heart of how you govern, how you run your city as a Black mayor, along with the other Black mayors in this country?     MAYOR BRANDON SCOTT (D), BALTIMORE, MARYLAND:  Yeah.  And, thank you, Mr. Lieutenant Governor, I think you hit the nail on the head, right?  We know that this is much more than about the numbers, because women lie, men lie, numbers do not.  And you know better than anyone, we’re talking about the City of Baltimore, a place that you represented as lieutenant governor.  On this date that we’re talking, August the 25th, having the fewest amount of homicides through this date ever on recorded record, ever.  This isn’t sheerly about the numbers, right?     And for us and for me as the mayor who’s leading the city, that’s not good enough.  I got into public service, Mr. Lieutenant Governor, because I ducked bullets at six and seven years old.  I’ve been robbed.  I’ve had to bury friends and family.  It’s different when you’ve done that.  It’s different when you’ve lived that.  And when you look at myself and my brother and sister mayors, it’s not just me.  You can see it in Chicago, you can see it in Birmingham, you can see it in Oakland, you can see it in Philadelphia, you can see it in New York, you can see it in D.C., where you all are right now.  We’re talking about historic reductions because we know how to do it.     If this was about driving down crime, what they would be doing is talking to the folks at the local level on the ground about what kind of support we need.  And we’ve laid that out because this is about us focusing in on those small groups of people who are the most likely to be the victim or perpetrator in gun violence, giving them a chance, and if they don’t, remove them.  This is about focusing in on guns and people that use them in our communities and remove them.  This is about investing in communities, providing opportunities for jobs, for education, recreational opportunity.  It’s about investing in community violence intervention.  It’s about having those partnerships with your police, your community, your state’s attorney, your attorney general, our FBI, ATF, DEA, all of our local agents who we have a great working relationship even right now, today.     This is what this should be about.  But what we’re seeing now is a lot of dog-whistling and trying to get people to not pay attention to these other things.  And it’s sad because what we really should be talking about is how this administration could be helping cities like mine and others to take the ball even further, because even with these historic reductions, you don’t hear me or any of the mayors saying, we’ve solved the issue.  We’re saying, we’re acknowledging it and we have to go even further.     DANIELS:  Mm-hmm.  Mr. Mayor, you know, we hear from — from you, we’ve had you on our show before, on The Weekend, and what Wes Moore has been saying, the governor of your state.  What are you guys working on pre-emptively, right?  Because we see that the president, and the Pentagon has apparently, according to reports, been working on sending troops to Chicago for weeks now.  He’s talking about you.  I assume that at some point that is on his mind as well.  What are you guys doing pre-emptively to protect the citizens of Baltimore from the military, when and if the president sends National Guard troops there?     SCOTT:  Well, we — listen, we don’t — we don’t need that.  We don’t want that.  We want additional — we’ve laid out how the administration can help us, right?  We — when we saw that last week, we said very clearly that we want additional agents for our FBI, ATF, DEA to work alongside our police officers on their predetermined things that they do every day, which they sign up to do.  And that’s go after people who are trafficking guns, drugs, and doing violence in our city, not to just be roaming around.  We want them to restore the cuts to violence programs that they’ve made that have impacted organizations in our city.  That’s how they can help us.     But we also know we have to be preparing our residents for what may come, letting them know what their rights are, letting them know what they should and shouldn’t be doing to escalate things because we all know how dangerous that’s going to be for residents not just in Baltimore, but around the country.  But what we’re going to continue to say is what actually can help, and what is the strategies that have been proven to work to reduce violence to levels that we’ve never seen, and how they can support that versus this dog and pony show of militarizing and saying that we’ll come in and clean up these cities because they’re cities run by Democrats and because, quite frankly, they have a lot of Black people in them.     DANIELS:  Yeah.  Mr. Mayor, have you — but are you guys thinking of pre-emptively suing?  Are you talking with the attorney general about what you actually can do to keep this from actually happening?  Because I hear you about, you know, preparing the citizens for it, and you guys having conversations and — and having conversations with us.  But what — what are the actions that could stop — possibly stop this or is it out of your hands?     SCOTT:  No.  We’re going to take every action that we can take legally and otherwise, right?  We’re going to be prepared in every way that we can.  But we also know, you all know this better than anybody, you’re covering it every day, we know that sometimes legal — legal rules don’t matter to these folks, right?  And we have to be prepared for the event that they will just do what they want anyway and take our appropriate action, but be prepared for the worst at the same time.     SYMONE SANDERS-TOWNSEND, CO-HOST:  You know, Mayor Scott, I talked to a number of mayors today and Black mayors, to be specific, and one mayor said to me, they are not looking at Toledo, Ohio, whose mayor is a Democrat, but who is a white woman.  They’re not looking at Detroit, Michigan, whose mayor is a Democrat but is a white man.  They’re not looking at Beaumont, Texas, Akron, Ohio, Springfield, Illinois.  They’re not looking or targeting.  It’s not just Democrats that they’re targeting.  And it’s not just cities with majority African American populations.  There’s a target on the backs of Black mayors in the United States of America.     I heard that the Black mayors have been chit chatting amongst one another, that you all have been having meetings.  Can you take us inside?  Because what is the strategy here?     SCOTT:  Well, first and foremost, we have to let folks know that and call it out.  We — it’s very clear that — that the target is on us, right?  And I think that folks have to understand what they’re trying to say here.  And what they’re trying to say is that we cannot be a part of the solution of reducing a problem, because when we know if we’re going to call a spade a spade, when you think about the way that those folks think, they — especially someone young, Black, and male like myself, I can’t be a part of the solution because I am the problem, right?  That’s the way that they think.     And what we have to continue continuously do is show them the opposite.  Show them no mayor in the history of my city have seen reductions in gun violence that I have, period, Black, white, or indifferent, but in particular as a young Black male, because it’s very personal for me.  Now we’re all going to strategize to make sure that we’re continuing to share those same strategies that has gotten us all these reductions, but that every way that we can fight this as separate individuals, but also as a unified group, that we will do that.  And showcasing to the country that Black mayors are leading in crime reduction.     Don’t be fooled about all these things that people are saying.  These folks are leading in ways that we have never seen before.  And we’re going to continue to do that even with this barrel — this barreling down our backs.  

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