Wes Moore digs at Trump for calling him ‘good-looking guy,’ says president is ‘obessed with me’

The Maryland governor and U.S. president continue to trade jabs in a growing political feud over crime.

Maryland Governor Wes Moore and President Donald Trump are continuing to trade jabs amid their growing political feud over crime and Trump’s repeated false story about his first and only face-to-face meeting with Moore.

After Trump mentioned Moore yet again during his hours-long Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday, Maryland’s first Black governor told CNN, “The president seems to be obsessed with me.”

After refusing Moore’s invitation to join a walking tour of Baltimore, Trump has repeatedly disparaged Maryland’s largest majority-Black city, including calling it a “hellhole.”

“First, you’ve got to clean up your crime,” said Trump, who also twice falsely characterized a December 2024 encounter with Moore, in which he claimed the Democratic governor called him “the greatest president of my lifetime” and that he was doing an “unbelievable job,” despite video of the exchange disputing those assertions.

In addition to countering Trump’s claims about crime in Baltimore and falsely putting words in his mouth, Moore suggested to CNN that Trump has also been concerned about his looks.

“Today, he called me a beauty. And when I first met him, he just talked about how I was a good-looking guy. And now he just continues to…make statements that are just flat-out false,” said Moore.

President Trump has threatened to send the military to Baltimore in a stated plan to tackle crime there, despite Moore and Baltimore City Mayor Brandon Scott touting the city’s 50-year drop in homicides and significant declines in other areas of crime.

“The reality is that when I first became the governor, Baltimore in 2022 had about a homicide a day. Now, in the past two and a half years, Baltimore and the State of Maryland had amongst the fastest drops in violent crime anywhere in the United States,” Moore explained. “The last time the homicide rate was this low in Baltimore City, I was not born yet.”

Addressing President Trump’s recollection of their encounter at last year’s Army-Navy football game in Maryland, Moore said, “I know this is breaking news to everybody, but the president is not telling the truth.”

The Maryland governor said that after Trump complimented his looks, he pivoted to discuss the need for approved federal funding to rebuild Maryland’s Francis Scott Key Bridge after a ship crashed into it in March 2024, causing its collapse. Trump has since threatened to withhold the funding amid his public spat with Moore.

Moore said Trump later invited the governor to sit with him at the game, which he declined.

“So no, I never called him the greatest, and I just find it absolutely comical that — that that was his — the way he remembered that conversation,” he added.

Gov. Moore’s taunting of Trump–including taking a dig at him for dodging the military draft–is noticeable as national Democrats work on the best strategies to effectively oppose Trump and the Republican Party’s dominance in Washington, D.C.

Moore and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have stood out among Trump’s Democratic critics, and both are rumored to be top contenders for president in 2028.

“It’s about time that Democrats are giving us a little bit of drama, a little bit of performance. Democrats so often are focused on results in delivering and they lose some of the art of politics,” political analyst Reecie Colbert told theGrio. “And I think that Newsom and Moore are really showing that there is power in taking and harnessing a certain energy that has been kind of lacking in terms of the Democratic response to Donald Trump and to MAGA.”