U.S. President Donald Trump has arrived in Baltimore, the eastern U.S., majority-black city he recently called a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.”
Trump was there Thursday to address Republican congressional leaders attending an annual retreat.
Before he left the White House, Trump ignored a reporter’s question about what he would say to the residents of the city, instead saying only that it was going to be “a very successful evening.”
Ahead of the president’s visit, activist groups planned to protest “racism, white supremacy, war, bigotry and climate change,” organizers told The Baltimore Sun.
On Thursday, several hundred protesters lined the route Trump’s motorcade took to the city’s Inner Harbor area, where Trump was to speak.
Trump has denied charges of racism on his attacks on the city and its congressman, Elijah Cummings.
“There is nothing racist in stating plainly what most people already know, that Elijah Cummings has done a terrible job for the people of his district, and of Baltimore itself,” he tweeted in July.