Donald Trump called Democrats’ intensifying impeachment inquiry a ‘lynching’ on Tuesday, drawing a stark comparison between the murders of thousands of African-Americans and the political process that might cost him his job.
Outraged Democratic lawmakers called the pronouncement racially charged. At least one Trump ally, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, backed him up.
Venting on Twitter, Trump echoed complaints from other Republicans about the summary-judgment nature of some procedures House Democrats have adopted, including limiting their opponents’ ability to call witnesses and provide legal counsel to those who the majority grill behind closed doors.
‘So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights,’ the president wrote.
‘All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here – a lynching. But we will WIN!’
It’s highly unusual for white politicians to invoke lynchings; the mob-murder phenomenon took the lives of 3,446 African-Americans in the U.S. between 1882 and 1968
President Donald Trump stepped into a racial minefield on Tuesday, calling Democrats’ move to impeach him a ‘lynching’
Illinois Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush erupted on Twitter, telling Trump that ‘people who look like you’ had lynched ‘people who look like me’
‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ Rep. Rush asked Trump: ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’
Asked if he could understand why African-Americans see the president’s reference to ‘lynching’ as a racial attack, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told reporters: ‘No, I think lynching is being seen as somebody taking the law in their own hands, and out to get somebody for no good reason’
Illinois Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush, who is black, erupted.
‘You think this impeachment is a LYNCHING?’ he tweeted. ‘What the hell is wrong with you? Do you know how many people who look like me have been lynched, since the inception of this country, by people who look like you. Delete this tweet.’
Separately, Rush tweeted that Trump’s choice of words was ‘[e]xample No. 5286 as to why this President is unfit for office.’
Rep. Karen Bass, a California Democrat who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, piled on the scorn.
‘You are comparing a constitutional process to the PREVALENT and SYSTEMATIC brutal torture of people in THIS COUNTRY that looked like me?’ Bass tweeted.
‘Every time your back is up against the wall, you throw out these racial bombs. We’re not taking the bait,’ she added.
Congressional Black Caucus chairwoman Karen Bass, a California Democratic member of the U.S. House, piled on the scorn
A crowd watched, in an undated photo found in the Library of Congress, as Caucasian men prepared a platform for the burning of an African-American man named Henry Smith, who was accused of raping and killing Myrtle Vance – the three-year-old daughter of a sheriff’s deputy
Painted lettering on the platform where Smith died spelled out ‘Justice’; the lynching drew a crowd of 10,000 people in Paris, Texas, where Smith was burned alive
South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, the House majority whip, was more measured on CNN. He said ‘lynching’ is ‘one word no president ought to apply to himself.’
‘I’m not just a politician up here, I’m a southern politician. I’m a product of the South,’ Clyburn said.’
‘I know the history of that word. That is a word that we ought to be very, very careful about using.’
Graham, a white southerner who has been an outspoken Trump ally on most subjects, defended him on Capitol Hill.
Asked if he could understand why African-Americans see the president’s reference to ‘lynching’ as a racial attack, he told reporters he couldn’t.
‘No, I think lynching is being seen as somebody taking the law in their own hands,’ he said, ‘and out to get somebody for no good reason.’
‘I think that’s pretty well accurate,’ Graham said of Trump’s comment about the fast-churning but still unofficial impeachment inquiry.
‘This is a sham. This is a joke… So yeah, this is a lynching and in every sense this un-American.’
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley spoke to reporters on Tuesday, insisting Trump didn’t mean to compare his situation to that of lynched African-Americans
White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley told a Fox News interviewer: ‘The president was not trying to compare himself to the horrific history in this country at all.’
‘What he was trying to point out, clearly, was that he has been attacked relentlessly by the mainstream media, without cause, without evidence, since the day he took over in this office.’
Gidley spoke to reporters after his TV appearance. ‘The president’s not comparing what’s happened to him to one of the country’s darkest moments. He’s just not. … He’s not comparing himself to those dark times,’ he said.
DailyMail.com pressed him, with no response: ‘He’s not being hanged from a tree.’
‘People are upset about President Trump’s words all the time,’ he protested, pivoting to economic results that he said benefit black Americans.
‘What the president has done for the African-American community is something no other president has been able to accomplish in my lifetime,’ Gidley boasted.
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the only African-American Senate Republican, defended the president – to a point.
‘There’s no question that the impeachment process is the closest thing of a political death row trial, so I get his absolute rejection of the process,’ Scott said, adding: ‘I wouldn’t use the word “lynching”.’
Gidley wouldn’t comment on Tuesday about whether he would have used that word himself.
A search of White House records and interview transcripts indicates that the president hasn’t used that word publicly while in office before. He has repeatedly called attacks on him from inside his own administration a ‘coup.’
The Tuskegee Institute says 3,446 African-Americans were lynched – hanged or burned to death by angry mobs – between 1882 and 1968 in the United States. The total number is likely far higher.
Photos of lynchings were often passed around as souvenirs in the Deep South during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, showing burned and dismembered bodies of black men.
South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, a member of House leadership, warned Trump that ‘lynching’ is a word no president should use to describe a lawful political predicament
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas called attacks on him during his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings ‘a high-tech lynching,’ words that stung coming from a black nominee
Congress made extrajudicial lynching murders a federal hate crime in 2018, equating them with other forms of racial terrorism.
Democratic Senators Kamala Harris of California, and Cory Booker of New Jersey introduced the bill along with South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott.
The word ‘lynching’ is rarely invoked by white politicians. Its most famous recent usage in American politics came a quarter-century ago during confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Facing uncorroborated allegations of sexual harassment from a former workplace subordinate, Thomas called Democrats’ hearings – led by then-senator Joe Biden – ‘a national disgrace.’
‘From my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I’m concerned it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas,’ he said.
‘And it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.’