Trump Compares Impeachment to Lynching

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Win McNamee/Getty Images

 

We ran the numbers: There are 1352 news articles covering this topic. 44% (596) are left leaning, 41% (549) center, 15% (207) right leaning.

In a tweet on Tuesday, President Trump compared his impeachment inquiry to a lynching. This comment was met with outrage in left-leaning articles, while right-leaning articles tend to focus on the mixed responses from Republicans to Trump’s comment; centrist articles tend to examine the reactions of congresspeople in general to the remark.

The Washington Post published a left-leaning article with the headline, “Trump’s ‘lynching’ comparison shows there’s no bottom to his sense of victimhood.” The article argues that the comparison makes clear that Trump is “completely insensitive” to the United States’ history of racism and violence. The article notes that Trump is not ignorant of the long history of racist violence against African Americans, as he has publicly toured museums of African American history on multiple occasions. However, the article argues that the president simply believes that no one has suffered the injustices he has.

A right-leaning Fox News article reports that Trump has also faced criticism for his comments from the right: one of his regular supporters, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, has called Trump’s use of the word “unfortunate.” The article also notes that some Democrats referred to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment proceedings in 1998 as a lynching. Additionally, Trump loyalist Senator Lindsay Graham claimed that the description was an accurate one, saying that the impeachment proceedings are “a lynching in every sense.”

A centrist article from NPR reports that Trump’s use of the word drew sharp criticism from both sides of the aisle. The article reports that some of the greatest criticism came from Representative Bobby Rush, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus who led the effort to classify real lynching as a federal crime. The article reports that there were nearly 5,000 recorded lynchings in the US between 1882 and 1968, likely with many more left unreported.


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