Lindsey Graham doesn’t see anything wrong with Donald Trump comparing his current plight to a “lynching”.
“I think that’s pretty well accurate”, the reliably sycophantic Graham said Tuesday, following Trump’s latest ridiculously tone deaf attempt to depict himself as some kind of victim, despite having only his own actions to blame for each and every problem he’s faced during his first (and, if there’s any justice left in the world, last, term 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”, an aggrieved Trump said Tuesday. “All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here – a lynching”.
As you can see, a bleary-eyed Graham adopted a vitriolic sneer in the course of saying the following, which, in a sense, is even more despicable than the tweet he’s defending:
This is a sham. This is a joke. I’m going to let the whole world know that if we were doing this to a Democratic president you’d be all over me right now. It says a lot about our national media. When it’s about Trump, who cares about the process?
Got that? It’s the media’s fault. The free press is responsible for all of Trump’s actions and words, including Tuesday’s allusion to hanging African Americans from trees.
To be clear, Democrats have not violated any “process”. This isn’t a jury trial (that comes later, probably in New York, once Trump is out of office), there is no Constitutional requirement that Nancy Pelosi hold a floor vote on the impeachment inquiry and it’s not required by House rules either. Period.
If you don’t think that’s true (i.e., if you believe that Republicans are correct to characterize what’s going on as somehow illegal), then ask yourself one question: Why haven’t they stopped it?
The answer is simple: Pelosi isn’t breaking any rules, let alone any laws.
Other Republicans weren’t so quick to defend Trump’s “lynching” remark.
“That’s not the language I would use”, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy said, when asked at a news conference about Trump’s tweet.
After launching into a lengthy diatribe aimed at bolstering the increasingly desperate GOP narrative that Trump’s lawyers should be able to “cross examine” the parade of officials who have been deposed over the past two weeks on Capitol Hill, a reporter asked Kevin to clarify why he wouldn’t call it a “lynching”.
“I don’t agree with that language. It’s pretty simple”, he responded.
Right. It is pretty simple. So simple, in fact, that even Jim Jordan was hesitant to follow Trump down an old dirt road in Alabama to the hangin’ tree.
“The President’s frustrated. I mean, if you had to go through the three years at this that this President had to live through, I think I think it just is an example of the frustration the President feel”, Jordan said.
One person who doesn’t see any connection at all between Trump being investigated by House Democrats for extorting Ukraine and African Americans being kidnapped by Klansmen and hung from trees, is Rep. Karen Bass, the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.
“You are comparing a constitutional process to the PREVALENT and SYSTEMATIC brutal torture of people in THIS COUNTRY that looked like me?”, she asked on Tuesday.
Yes, Karen. Unfortunately, that is what the president is doing. And so is Lindsey Graham.
Trump. Born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. What a loser.