Traffic was terrible today. The internet is down. I didn’t think anyone would be offended.
Modern life is full of excuses. We apologize for poor behavior, missed cues and misfires on social media that shock and insult.
Isabel Mercedes Cumming should know this. She’s the Baltimore City inspector general, and her job is to spot others’ missteps and misconduct.
So when her apology for posting a video and AI-generated image Monday of Mayor Brandon Scott that played on racist tropes about Black people fell flat — Scott and others were quick to pounce with outrage.
“For an office built on impartiality, the choice to publicly post insulting and offensive content to attack a sitting Mayor undermines public trust and the work of an oversight office overall,” state Senate President Bill Ferguson posted on Twitter (do we have to call it X?).
We are deep into the age of posting stupid things online. It can cost you a friendship, standing in your community, a job or — and this is the fuzzy math of it — absolutely nothing.
Cumming is hoping for nothing.
“A friend sent me this very interesting video from YouTube — ties many things together,” she wrote in her post.
The video included an AI image of Scott chomping a cigar, clutching a glass of booze and holding a fistful of luxury shopping bags in front of a suitcase of cash.
She took the video down amid the uproar, blamed ignorance and tried to distance herself from the “satirical, AI-generated digital image that I did not notice and do not endorse or support.”
It’s hard to believe a white public official in a majority-Black city with a long history of Black men and women in political power could miss the subtext.
Cumming is trying the Donald Trump style of social media etiquette, hoping for a willing suspension of disbelief.
The president admits nothing, a moral jiujitsu that flips blame onto the offended for not having a sense of humor.
It works for him because he posts so much offensive crap that apologizing for just the worst bits would leave him no time to get us into more Middle East wars. We are desensitized to his inanity.
We’ve just seen a rare example of the president reversing course, taking down an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ in a red-and-white robe, healing a man while worshipful people surround them.
The president’s conservative Christian base was offended, maybe because it followed his WWE-style social-media smackdown attempt on Pope Bob (Leo XIV, but he’s from Chicago, so, you know).
“I thought it was me as a doctor,” Trump said at the White House. “Only the fake news could come up with that.
“I make people better.”
Not an apology, but about as close as anyone is likely to get from the president.
Cumming isn’t Trump, of course, so she probably should have hewed closer to the other end of the apology scale, Graham Platner. He’s an oyster farmer running for the U.S. Senate in the Maine Democratic primary.
Last year, Platner apologized for old Reddit posts in which he referred to himself as a “communist,” criticized police and called rural, white Americans racist and stupid.
An Army and Marine veteran, he blamed the posts on being disillusioned after returning from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“When I got back from Afghanistan in 2011, I stayed in the Army for another year,” he said. “I got out in 2012. Some of the worst comments I made, the things that I think are least defensible, that I wouldn’t even try to defend, come from that time.”
Platner apologized again just the other day for using a developmental disabilities slur.
“I’m sorry that I said it,” he said. “I am endeavoring to improve every single day. I am not a perfect person, and I continue to try to be better.”
Platner, unlike Trump, owned his poor behavior.
We live in a society where speech is supposed to be free, and, if you are a libertarian or billionaire, without limits. Sometimes there are no consequences for offending, but those of us in less lofty positions than president or progressive hero probably should expect them.
Hundreds of people around the country got into trouble after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing evangelist who often mixed racism with the Good News. It wasn’t that they were wrong to point out the problem with hailing him as a martyr; it was the timing that was offensive.
Cumming’s comments represent — at best — a breathtaking lapse of judgment.
“I apologize to Mayor Scott, my dedicated OIG team, and the residents of Baltimore City,” she said. “This post detracted from the important mission of the OIG to investigate waste, financial abuse and fraud. It will not happen again.”
Scott’s office is fighting her in court over access to public records. He clearly doesn’t want an IG looking over his shoulder, and her post helps him shape that scrutiny as white distrust of Black political power.
Cumming appears to be winning the legal argument. A judge overseeing the dispute signaled that she could rule that the administration is trying to minimize the inspector general’s authority under the city charter.
Her post, however, may turn that into a Pyrrhic victory, one that shows apologies don’t always trump consequences.
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