Calls Baltimore "a total mess" as officers are charged over Freddie Gray's death

On May 1, 2015 -- the same day Baltimore's state's attorney announced criminal charges against six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray -- Trump tweeted: "Billions of dollars spent on Baltimore and it's still a total mess. Leadership is needed, not dollars." The tweet came three days after an earlier round of tweets, during the height of unrest following Gray's death in police custody, in which Trump said he could "fix it fast" and called Baltimore's mayor a "genius" over her handling of the unrest. Retrospective coverage in 2019, after Trump as president described Baltimore as "a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess," traced that later attack back to his 2015 tweets as an established pattern. The May 1 tweet itself is a terse, dismissive framing of a live civil-rights crisis as a matter of wasted money and absent leadership rather than the underlying circumstances of Gray's death.

“Billions of dollars spent on Baltimore and it's still a total mess. Leadership is needed, not dollars.” Quote verified against source