Elijah Cummings, Democratic chairman and powerful Trump critic, dies at 68

Longtime Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the son of a sharecropper who rose to become chairman of the powerful House Oversight Committee, has died at the age of 68. For decades, Cummings was a respected and well-known figure in Washington, D.C. and in his beloved native city of Baltimore, with close friends on both sides of the aisle. But he was thrust in the national spotlight this past year as he and newly empowered House Democrats repeatedly clashed with President Trump and his administration. As Cummings’s committee probed Trump’s policies, businesses and family members, the president lashed out at the Maryland Democrat by calling his Baltimore-based congressional district a “rodent-infested mess.”