BALTIMORE — Each year on her birthday in mid-July, Jennifer Cummings goes to her old voicemails and listens to her father’s achingly familiar voice sending his love on a birthday long since passed.
U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, 68, died in 2019 but his eldest daughter, 42, still hears his distinctive baritone — not only in archived messages she will never delete, but in her mind when she needs reassurance.
The late congressman’s family and close friends often feel his presence around elections — he held elective office for nearly 40 years — but never more so than when the ballot includes former President Donald Trump, who mocked Cummings, his hometown of Baltimore and his congressional district, which Trump called “rat and rodent infested.”
Trump, a Republican, is seeking to regain the presidency in the November election against Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat.
“It’s been personal since the beginning,” said U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume, a longtime friend of Cummings who delivered a eulogy at his October 2019 funeral — along with former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton — and is an ardent Harris supporter. “For those of us who really knew Elijah, it’s hard not to think about him and juxtapose him in our minds against what’s going on,” Mfume said in an interview earlier this month.
“It’s personal, as it should be for every American,” said Maya Rockeymore Cummings, the congressman’s widow
In the months before his death, Cummings and the House Oversight Committee, which he chaired, were investigating poor conditions at facilities holding children suspected of crossing the border illegally.
On a July morning, Trump let loose a string of tweets. “Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA,” Trump tweeted.
Gov. Wes Moore, for whom Cummings was a mentor, remembers the tweets well enough that he can quote them from memory.
“I loved Elijah Cummings,” Moore said in an interview at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Sunday. “We had a president who talked about us in nothing but derogatory terms. It just showed me and highlighted to me why I will work to make sure that Vice President Kamala Harris is my partner.”
Trump also called Cummings’ Congressional District 7 — now held by Mfume — “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” and posted in 2019 that Cummings should spend more time in Baltimore to “help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”
Jennifer Cummings, who works for a business advocacy organization and helps run a Baltimore youth program her father started, said the tweets came on top of a period in which her father’s health was deteriorating.
He suffered from cancer. He also contracted pneumonia, he wrote in a book shortly before his death, and was sicker than the public realized when he delivered a National Press Club speech from a wheelchair in August 2019 and invited Trump to visit his district to see a different sort of Baltimore than the one Trump had described. Trump did not respond to the invitation.
Cummings wrote in his book that he tried to dismiss Trump’s taunts by “saying he’s just a blowhard and schoolyard tough guy, using his thumbs on Twitter like fists.”
But he wrote that “the onslaught” hurt him deeply.
“It was painful for him, especially at a time when physically he wasn’t doing well,” said Jennifer Cummings. “At the time, I was like you’re beating up on my dad but you’re also beating up on my city, and that felt deeply personal.”
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung did not respond to messages seeking comment.
As she often does, Jennifer asks herself: What would Elijah do now?
At the time of his 2019 book, her father was already publicly saying he considered Trump a threat to democracy. That was before Trump encouraged supporters to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, where they stormed the building trying unsuccessfully to halt the 2020 presidential election vote count declaring Democrat Joe Biden the winner.
Cummings titled the book “We’re Better Than This: My Fight for the Future of Our Democracy.”
Five years later, Harris and Democratic allies running for Congress in November say Trump must be defeated because he disrespects democratic principles such as the peaceful transfer of presidential power.
“My dad would not allow it to be about him,” the daughter said. “He allowed a lot of us to have the anger that he would not carry. His belief was that there would be deliverance and — no matter what Trump did — that the citizens of Baltimore would be delivered from that scourge and condemnation, and that time would heal all wounds. He didn’t go out and bow his head and indicate somehow or another that he was wounded.”
So Jennifer Cummings, who sometimes wears a T-shirt with her father’s image on it, said she is trying to look ahead rather than back. She said she thinks of him when she votes in elections, and intuitively knows who he would have voted for.
“I think that ultimately, what he would encourage me or anybody to put their energy into is not focusing on what Trump said — that’s old news,” she said. “Without a shadow of a doubt, he absolutely would do everything in his power to get Kamala Harris elected president of the United States.”
