Donald Trump compared the House of Representative's ongoing inquiry into his potentially impeachable offenses to a "lynching" on Twitter on Tuesday.
In spite of an impeachment being about the only way a sitting president can face charges due to a series of court decisions and Department of Justice guidelines, the president said he was being denied due process.
"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," he wrote. "All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here - a lynching."
An impeachment functions as a sort of grand jury indictment of the president, wherein the House decides a president should stand trail and the Senate holds the trial to decide if a president should be removed from office. A lynching is an extrajudicial killing of someone who was not been convicted of a crime and, in the United States, carries heavy connotations of racially motivated violence in the South.
Given the weight of Trump's language, and the racist motivations of much of his party's policies, Twitter immediately took the president to task for his analogy.
Senator Lindsey Graham and former congressman Newt Gingrich both defended Trump's language and were lambasted as well.
As expected, Trump has yet to delete the tweet, let alone apologize for it.
