Inquiry similar to “lynching,” Trump tweets
WASHINGTON» President Donald Trump reached back Tuesday to some of the darkest annals of U.S. history, comparing his legal predicament to the violent deaths of Americans brutalized by vigilantes.
In describing his impeachment as a “lynching,” Trump managed once again to create a political firestorm around race while frustrating members of his party and drawing condemnation from lawmakers who hold his political fate in their hands.
It was the latest example of Trump’s impromptu impeach
ment response, which has unnerved and hamstrung Republicans tasked with trying to defend him.
Republicans from Capitol Hill to the White House spent much of Tuesday answering questions about the tweet, with responses that ranged from light criticism to awkward justifications. Only a few chose to fully embrace the president’s use of a term most associated with the barbaric hanging of African-American men.
“Given the history of our country, I would not compare this to a lynching,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters Tuesday. “That was an unfortunate choice of words.”
Democrats roundly criticized the president’s comment, with some contemplating a House vote to condemn his language.
Trump took to Twitter early Tuesday morning to lament publicly about how Democrats are running their impeachment inquiry, repeating familiar talking points before making his first public reference to “lynching” as president.
“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,” Trump wrote Tuesday on Twitter. “All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here — a lynching. But we will WIN!”
Lynching, the extrajudicial murder of an untried suspect, usually by a mob and often by hanging, has a unique history in the United States because of its direct link to slavery and racism. In the United States, more than 4,700 lynchings were recorded between 1882 and 1968, according to the NAACP. Of those murdered people, almost three-quarters were black men, women and children. An untold number of runaway slaves were lynched after being captured.
Trump’s willingness to describe his political predicament as a lynching displayed an “ignorance” of that history, said Michael Eric Dyson, a sociology professor at Georgetown University.
“It’s a kind of willful manipulation of this historic symbol of black vulnerability to score points,” he said. “But he’s ignorant enough to not understand that that’s not something that you just willy-nilly do.”
The White House sought to defend Trump’s rhetoric as unrelated to race.
“The president’s not comparing what’s happened to him with one of our darkest moments in American history,” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said. “What he’s explaining clearly is the way he’s been treated by the media since he announced for president.”
And some of Trump’s allies highlighted videos and news archives that showed Democrats using similar language to describe the GOP-led impeachment of former President Bill Clinton.
Current House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., in 1998 told the Associated Press that “Republicans so far have been running a lynch mob.”
But Trump’s latest comments recall his lengthy and fraught history with race. He took out a fullpage ad in 1989 calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty after the arrest of the Central Park Five — Harlem teenage boys of color accused of beating and raping a female jogger. Even after DNA evidence exonerated the five, Trump refused to accept that they were not guilty.
In July, Trump posted tweets telling four minority congresswomen — all U.S. citizens — to “go back” to their ancestral countries.