this is one of those situations where the one-party system in the united states turns the discourse into a sick joke. but, if trump wants to have a conversation about inner city conditions in the collapsing industrial north, the actual left should take advantage of it.

sanders is absolutely right when he points out that inner city conditions in many cities across the north are at third world levels, for many of the inhabitants. trump is absolutely correct to repeat these claims, and he is absolutely correct to point fingers at the democratic party as an institution, even if the responsibility lies more at the city council level than at the congressional level. it is not clear what trump expects elijah cummings to accomplish for his city at the congressional level, in the face of decades of republican dominance. but, there is absolutely an under class in these cities of unneeded workers (marxists would refer to this as the industrial reserve army), and it is mostly black. there is rife revolutionary potential within this underclass, and it should be organized, but it should not be organized within the democratic party, which seeks not to improve the living conditions of these people, or to finally free them from capitalism, but to find ways to keep them in order. this is the mandate of the democratic party: to stop the marginalized from rising up. of course, it goes without saying that it should not be organized within the republican party either, as they will seek gentrification and mass displacement; if the democrats want to keep these people locked to their crumbling infrastructure as serfs in a neo-feudal order, the republicans just want to sweep them into the ocean.

a real, grassroots movement within a third party that has an actual socialist program is absolutely required to address these issues, and it should operate largely at the state level of jurisdiction. this decaying property needs to be seized by the people and converted into social housing with money raised by taxing the wealth in the suburbs.

all you will get from the one-party system is the status quo, or worse.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/455116-trump-seizes-on-sanders-past-criticism-of-baltimore