Trump Equates House Impeachment Inquiry to a ‘Lynching’

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump invoked a tragic and violent aspect of the history of racism in America by calling the impeachment inquiry led by House Democrats a lynching.

“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. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here - a lynching,” Trump said in a tweet Tuesday.

Lynchings were extra-judicial murders of ethnic minorities, primarily African Americans, carried out by angry mobs, including such hate groups as the Ku Klux Klan, predominantly in the U.S. South after the Civil War.

More than 4,700 lynchings occurred in the U.S. between 1882 and 1968, with African Americans accounting for nearly three-quarters of the victims, according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a civil rights organization.

The comment represents some of Trump’s harshest rhetoric to date concerning the impeachment inquiry, which he’s assailed as a political witch hunt. It may signal an attempt to appeal directly to his base, which so far has stuck with Trump, even as more moderate Republican lawmakers have expressed misgivings about his behavior.

Trump’s use of the racially-charged term comes on the eve of memorial services for the late Elijah Cummings, a civil rights advocate and one of the most prominent African American lawmakers in the House. Cummings, who represented Baltimore for more than 20 years until his death last week, was one of Trump’s fiercest critics and a central figure in the chamber’s impeachment inquiry as the House Oversight Committee’s chairman.

The tweet prompted strong criticism from other African American lawmakers.

‘History of That Word’

“You think this impeachment is a LYNCHING? What the hell is wrong with you?” Representative Bobby Rush, an Illinois Democrat who was the only politician to defeat former president Barack Obama in an election, said in a tweet. “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.”

Representative James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat, said no president should apply that word to themselves, and that Trump’s use of it offended his sense of history.

“I’m a southern politician. I’m a product of the South. I know the history of that word. That is a word that we ought to be very very careful about using,” Clyburn said in an interview with CNN.

Even Senate majority leader, Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, called Trump’s choice of words “unfortunate.”

“Given the history in our country I would not compare this to a lynching,” McConnell said. “A better way to characterize it would be to call it an unfair process.”

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley downplayed Trump’s remarks.

Responding to Attacks

“The president wasn’t trying to compare himself to the horrific history in this country at all,” Gidley said, adding that he hadn’t spoken to Trump directly about the tweet. Instead, he was trying to convey that he was being unfairly attacked by the media, Gidley said.

House Democrats are looking to advance the impeachment probe Tuesday with testimony from the top U.S. diplomat to Ukraine, who had warned it was “crazy” to withhold military aid in a bid to get dirt on the president’s political rivals.

The investigation was prompted by a whistle-blower’s complaint to the intelligence community inspector general that Trump may have been using his office and foreign policy to advance his own political career. It involved a July 25 telephone call in which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to “look into” unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing by former Vice President Joe Biden, who is seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination to challenge Trump next year.

A summary of the call released by the White House confirmed the request, despite Trump’s repeated reference to it as “a perfect call.” Trump acknowledges ordering a halt to about $400 million in vital U.S. military aid to Ukraine about a week before the call, which is seen by some as having added leverage to his request.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ryan Beene in Washington at rbeene@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jon Morgan at jmorgan97@bloomberg.net, Justin Blum, Joshua Gallu

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