PRESIDENT SAYS IMPEACHMENT EFFORTS ‘A LYNCHING’
Biden used racially charged term in ’98
WASHINGTON — Stirring up painful memories of America’s racist past, President Donald Trump on Tuesday compared the Democraticled impeachment inquiry to a lynching, a practice once widespread across the South in which angry mobs killed thousands of black people.
The use of such inflammatory imagery triggered an outcry from Democratic legislators and condemnation from outside the Washington Beltway. Trump has spent recent days pressuring Republicans to give him stronger support in countering the impeachment investigation.
Trumps tweeted suggestion that Republicans “remember what they are witnessing here — a lynching” came a day after Trump said the GOP needs to “get tougher and fight” against the fast-moving inquiry into whether he tried to withhold U.S. military aid until Ukraine’s government agreed to investigate Democrat Joe Biden and his son.
The White House said later Tuesday that Trump was not comparing impeachment to “one of the darkest moments in American history.” Spokesman Hogan Gidley said Trump sent the tweet to point out what he feels is his continued mistreatment by the news media.
Trump began his tweet: “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.”
Tuesday night, Trump’s reelection campaign tweeted out a 1998 video of then-Sen. Biden talking about President Bill Clinton’s impending impeachment and saying, in part, “History is going to question whether or not this was just a partisan lynching.”
Earlier in the day, Biden referred to Trump’s lynching comparison as “abhorrent” and “despicable.” His Democratic presidential campaign declined to comment on his 1998 statements.
The reference to a lynching struck a deep, painful chord for black people whose relatives died in racist killings.
Malinda Edwards, whose father was forced to jump off an Alabama river bridge in 1957 by Klansmen who heard that he had smiled at a white woman, said Trump was making light of the horror experienced by victims.
“Either he’s very ignorant or very insensitive or very racist and just doesn’t care,” Edwards, 66, of Dayton, Ohio, said of the president.
Her father’s name is now on a memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, that honors more than 4,000 lynching victims.