WASHINGTON — Stirring up painful memories of America’s racist past, President Donald Trump on Tuesday compared the Democratic-led 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 to lash out at the House investigation into Trump’s dealings with Ukraine triggered an outcry from Democratic legislators, some mild rebukes but also some agreement from the president’s Republican allies and condemnation from outside the Washington Beltway. It also led to the unearthing of decades-old comments from some Democratic lawmakers, including now-presidential candidate Joe Biden, comparing the process of impeaching President Bill Clinton to a lynching.
Trump has spent recent days pressuring Republicans to give him stronger support in countering the impeachment investigation.
His tweeted suggestion that they “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, who has been complaining about unfairness in the impeachment process being led by House Democrats, 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.”
Fighting back Tuesday night, Trump’s re-election 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 presidential campaign declined to comment on his 1998 statements.
Trump’s remark was the latest instance in which he has tried to advance his political interests by unleashing racially inflammatory language.
Over the summer, he told four Democratic congresswomen of color to go back to their “broken and crime-infested” countries, although the four are U.S. citizens. Earlier in his presidency, Trump unleashed a firestorm by saying there were “very fine people” on both sides of a 2017 white supremacist rally and counterprotest in Charlottesville, Va., that resulted in the death of an anti-racism demonstrator.
Strikes painful chord
The reference to a lynching struck a deep, painful chord for black people whose relatives died in racially motivated 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 among those on a memorial in Montgomery, Ala., honoring more than 4,000 lynching victims.
Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, a black Republican, went a step further by tweeting a graphic black-and-white photo of a black man hanging from a tree and said: “This is a lynching. Trump this is not happening to you and it’s pathetic that you act like you’re such a victim.”
Trump’s closest Republican backers in Congress agreed with him, though others rejected his comparison.
“This is a lynching in every sense,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who is close to Trump.
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., criticized Trump’s “unfortunate choice of words,” saying it’s better to describe the impeachment process as “unfair.”
