President Donald Trump lashed out at a freshman Democratic congresswoman on Friday, saying she ‘dishonored herself’ and ‘dishonored her family’ by making a foul-mouthed vow to impeach him.
‘I thought her comments were disgraceful,’ Trump said of Rashida Tlaib, who was captured on video Thursday night telling attendees of a party hosted by a liberal group that the new Democratic House majority is ‘going to impeach the motherf***ker.’
Tlaib was recalling what she had told one of her young sons about the significance of her victory in Michigan’s 13th Congressional district.
Tlaib drew exasperated sighs from fellow Democrats and scorn from Republicans. Trump made his first comment on the episode as he took questions from reporters in the White House Rose Garden.
President Donald Trump scolded a new Democratic congresswoman on Friday, saying she ‘dishonored her family’ when she told her young son that her election was significant because Democrats are ‘going to impeach the motherf***er’
Rashida Tlaib hasn’t apologized for the remark, which shocked both sides of the aisle just hours after she became the first Palestinian-American woman to serve in Congress
Tlaib is the first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress and one of very few Muslims to serve.
‘This is a person that I don’t know. I assume she’s new,’ Trump said.
‘I think she dishonored herself, and I think she dishonored her family. Using language like that in front of her son, and whoever else was there? I thought that was a great dishonor to her and to her family.’
‘I thought it was highly disrespectful to the United States of America,’ the president added.
Reporters tried to ask Tlaib about her comments on Friday afternoon following a photo call at the Capitol attended by all the Democratic Caucus’s women.
She turned and walked away, speeding up as the questions rained down and ultimately escaping behind a police-tape line and down a staircase into the complex’s underground.
Trump spoke to reporters in the Rose Garden about his standoff with House Democrats over border-wall funding
By then Tlaib had doubled down on Twitter, refusing to apologize.
‘I will always speak truth to power. #unapologeticallyMe,’ she tweeted.
‘This is not just about Donald Trump,’ she claimed. ‘This is about all of us. In the face of this constitutional crisis, we must rise.’ She didn’t specify what constitutional crisis she was reacting to.
Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy blasted her on Friday, and slapped at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for not publicly disavowing the slur.
‘Are the House majority going to be serious about anything?’ he asked reporters.
Pelosi had told an MSNBC audience minutes earlier that she was ‘not in the censorship business,’ claiming Tlaib’s words were no worse than President Trump’s typical vernacular.
Tlaib told supporters at a party hosted by the liberal MoveOn group that ‘we’re going to impeach the motherf***er’ about President Trump
Newly minted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday that she’s ‘not in the censorship business,’ implying that she’s okay with Tlaib’s language
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy demanded minutes later that someone in the Houe Democratic Caucus ‘stand up to’ Pelosi for the sake of decorum
Tlaib doubled down on Friday, refusing to apologize and citing a non-specific ‘constitutional crisis’ in claiming: ‘we must rise’
Pelosi found herself on the spot Friday morning but insisted she wouldn’t intervene with Tlaib despite calling talk of impeachment ‘divisive.’
‘I probably have a generational reaction to it,” she said, adding: ‘I’m not in the censorship business. I don’t like that language, I wouldn’t use that language, but I wouldn’t establish language standards for my colleagues.’
Pelosi also claimed calling Trump a ‘motherf***er’ was ‘nothing worse than the president has said.’
‘I don’t think we should make a big deal of it,’ she declared.
McCarthy, usually calm and unflappable, was visibly agitated as he spoke with journalists on Capitol Hill.
‘How do you work with anybody if this is what they really have planned? That they go down into a place, they have the MoveOn, they think others aren’t watching it, they’re using foul language. They introduce that they just want to impeach the president. Over what basis? We have government shutdown right now. Where are their priorities?’ he asked.
‘We watched a brand new speaker say nothing to her. … That action should not stand,’ McCarthy vented.
‘Somebody should stand up to her. She’s the speaker. That individual sits in her caucus. I would hope if she wouldn’t, others in her caucus would.’
Tlaib’s spokesperson said Friday that she ‘was elected to shake up Washington, not continue the status quo. Donald Trump is completely unfit to serve as President. The Congresswoman absolutely believes he needs to be impeached. She ran and won by making this very clear to the voters in her district.’
Tlaib, who represents Michigan’s 13th district, had already published an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press calling on Democrats to start impeachment proceedings against Trump on day one
Tlaib had penned an op-ed for the Detroit Free Press alongside John Bonifaz, a constitutional lawyer and founder of the ‘Impeach Donald Trump Now’ campaign, in which the pair issued the same demand.
‘President Donald Trump is a direct and serious threat to our country,’ they wrote.
‘On an almost daily basis, he attacks our Constitution, our democracy, the rule of law and the people who are in this country. His conduct has created a constitutional crisis that we must confront now.’
The pair also dismiss the idea of waiting for Robert Mueller to finish his investigation before beginning impeachment proceedings, and say it would be a betrayal of the American people to wait until the 2020 election to unseat him.
‘This is not just about Donald Trump. This is about all of us. What should we be as a nation? Who should we be as a people?,’ they said.
Tlaib spoke out as Democrats pledged to tackle Trump head-on after taking back control of the House of Representatives at the start of the New Year
Democrat Brad Sherman, of California, has already introduced articles of impeachment against Trump, the same stunt he performed in 2017
‘In the face of this constitutional crisis, we must rise. We must rise to defend our Constitution, to defend our democracy, and to defend that bedrock principle that no one is above the law, not even the President of the United States.
‘Each passing day brings more pain for the people most directly hurt by this president, and these are days we simply cannot get back. The time for impeachment proceedings is now.’
Her fiery remarks came as fellow California Democrat Rep. Brad Sherman used his first day in office to file an impeachment resolution against Trump.
Sherman introduced an identical bill in 2017, charging that Trump obstructed justice when he fired FBI Director James Comey just months after moving into the White House.
The resolution accuses Trump of ‘threatening, and then terminating’ Comey because he knew the FBI was investigating then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and ‘conducting one or more investigations into Russian state interference in the 2016 campaign.’
Meanwhile Nancy Pelosi stepped up pressure on Trump as the House passing a spending bill which would reopen the government, but without $5.6billion in funding for his wall