Donald Trump does not share many identifiable traits with former president George W. Bush, or with Bush’s late father, George H.W. Bush. But there is one confounding trait that all three men have regularly exhibited during their time in the White House… a trait that leaves their friends and supporters thoroughly perplexed. I refer to their apparent inability to respond to Democratic slights or insults with “biting” responses. Whenever Democrats unwittingly give Republicans an open opportunity for a knockout retort, Republicans invariably treat the opportunity as if it were a sexually transmitted disease.
For example, in July 1990, after haggling for months with congressional Democrats over spending cuts vs. tax increases, the matter was ultimately resolved at an “economic summit” held at Andrews Air Force Base. At that summit, Democrats agreed to specific spending cuts, while Bush agreed to tax increases, abandoning his famous “read my lips; no new taxes” pledge and setting the stage for his defeat in 1992. Bush shook hands on the deal with House and Senate Democrats and returned to the White House to await the agreed-upon legislations.
When the spending bills arrived on his desk, he signed them into law. He then leaned back in his chair to await the promised spending cuts. He waited… and waited… and waited. But, as might be expected, no spending reductions ever arrived. It was a perfect example of the sincerity of a Democratic handshake. It was also an object lesson that he and George W. had available to them in subsequent years. But either they failed to remember the duplicity of 1990, or they were too nice or too dumb to recognize its value as a political weapon.
Now, in October 2019, nearly thirty years later, Republicans have been given a stunning invitation to let every American citizen, especially those in the African American community, understand the true history of the Democratic Party.
In an early morning tweet on Tuesday, October 22, Trump expressed his anger and frustration with the totally unfair and illegitimate process that House Democrats are using in their attempt to justify his impeachment. He tweeted, “So someday, 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. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here — a lynching. But we will WIN!”
To put Trump’s use of the term “lynching” into some context, it is first necessary to recognize that, according to archival statistics at Tuskegee Institute and at the NAACP, between 1882 and 1968, there were 4,743 recorded lynchings in the United States. Of these, 3,446 were blacks, and 1,297 were whites… a great many of them white Republicans. So, the question arises, how many white Republicans have Democrats murdered, for no better reason than that they disagreed with them politically? And how many Democrats have Republicans murdered in response?
So, who were these mass murderers? In their condemnation, while hoping to put a respectable face on the Democrat Party and their destructive paternalism of black people, NBC noted that, “The president’s use of ‘lynching,’ which elicits a time when black Americans were murdered by extrajudicial white mobs, was the subject of immediate blowback.” When we consider that white Democrats have gone to great lengths for the past 154 years to hide the fact that they were the principal opponents of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments…. outlawing slavery and giving the former slaves citizenship and voting rights… as well as the authors of the Black Codes and the Jim Crow laws, to say that their paramilitary auxiliary, the KKK, was nothing more than an “extrajudicial white mob” takes political correctness to a never-before-seen level of silliness.
Needless to say, Trump’s use of the term “lynching” brought immediate condemnation. Representative Barbara Jackson Lee (D-TX) said, “For him to say something like that was disgusting, reflects his insensitivity toward the historical tragedies of this country…” To add a bit of perspective to her criticism, one would have to ask Ms. Lee, “Whose sensitivity?” What sensitivity have Democrats, black and white, shown toward the mindless brutalizing of the black race by a Democratic paramilitary auxiliary, the KKK? The truth is, most black people regularly vote for candidates of the same party that committed unspeakable acts of cruelty against their forebears.
For example, in May of 1918, there were a series of lynchings in Georgia. When Mary Turner, who was nine-months pregnant at the time, complained that she was going to see to it that the white men who lynched her husband would be prosecuted, a mob dragged her from her home, tortured her, and hanged her. Then, while she was still alive, hanging from a rope, they cut open her womb. The child spilled out onto the ground and they crushed the baby’s skull under the heel of a boot.
One wonders how much success Mary Turner might have had in her quest for Justice. In many (most?) instances of Klan violence it was no secret who was hidden beneath the white sheets and under the white peaked hats. Unfortunately, other than their costumes, the Klansmen all shared another very important thing in common: they were all Democrats. And since all the members of the local constabulary were Democrats, as were the prosecutors, judges, and juries, successful prosecutions of Klan violence were a rarity.
Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) responded to Trump’s tweet, saying, “Lynching is a reprehensible stain on this nation’s history, as is this President. We’ll never erase the pain and trauma of lynching, and to invoke that torture to whitewash your own corruption is disgraceful.” When Democrats decided during the mid-1950s that, since slavery was no longer a viable alternative in the U.S., they would have to purchase the loyalty of blacks with a multi-trillion dollar social welfare spending spree, is it not reasonable for us to ask Sen. Harris whether or not the welfare state is just the Democrats’ way of “whitewashing” their own corruption?
Representative Bobby Rush (D-IL) said, “You think this impeachment is a LYNCHING? What the hell is wrong with you? Do you know how many people who look like me have been lynched, since the inception of this country, by people who look like you? Delete this tweet.” Rep. Rush thoughtlessly lumps all whites into a single group when he addresses Trump as “people who look like you.” We should remind Representative Rush that the hundreds of thousands who fought and died in a great war to end slavery did not all look alike. Some who looked like Donald Trump (my great-grandfather, Lt. Col. Johann Dietrich Hollrah of the Union Army, among them) were devout abolitionists; other white combatants felt just as strongly about maintaining the institution of slavery.
The Australian website news.com came as close as anyone to defining, perhaps unwittingly, what the fury is all about. They wrote, “Lynchings, or hangings, were historically mostly used by whites against black men in the South beginning in the late 19th century amid rising racial tensions in the US. By comparing the impeachment process to a lynching, Mr. Trump is also likening Democrats to a lynch mob.” So, what’s their point? When one considers all of the above, concluding that the Democrat Party is, in fact, the party of Slavery, Secession, and Segregation, we leave it to everyone’s conscience to decide which party most resembles a “lynch mob.”
How many black Democrats, who regularly cast 90-95% of their votes for members of the party that murdered their great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, are now among Donald Trump’s most vocal critics? How many of them are even aware of their party’s racist history? And how many black children learn the history of the slavery era in their Black History classes? Given the predictable destruction of the black family unit that can be traced directly to the Democrats’ management of the welfare state, is it not treasonable to ask whether or not the welfare state has not been used by the Democrat Party as “an act of terror used to uphold white supremacy,” as Senator Cory Booker has suggested?
And finally, when one considers the evils of lynching, it is simply not possible to have such a discussion without recalling the ordeal of Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, at the hands of Senate Democrats.
Clarence Thomas was nominated as an Associate Justice by President George H.W. Bush. But, if Thomas had known in advance the physical and emotional agony he would experience at the hands of Senate Democrats, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he would not have hesitated; he would have declined the president’s nomination.
On the final day of his Senate confirmation hearing, Friday, October 11, 1991, Justice Thomas delivered what was the most devastating rebuke that a committee of the United States Senate has ever endured. He closed his remarks by saying, “This is a circus. It is a national disgrace. And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I am concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that, unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.”
Clarence Thomas must sit before his TV each night with a tear in his eye, saying a silent prayer for President Donald Trump. What they did to Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh, and to Judge Robert Bork, is simply standard Democrat procedure. It’s just the way they play the game. No one knows that better than these three jurists. Trump is right. What they experienced, and what Trump is experiencing now, can only be described by two words: it is a “public lynching.”
Paul R. Hollrah is a retired government relations executive and a two-time member of the U.S. Electoral College. He currently lives and writes among the hills and lakes of northeast Oklahoma’s Green Country.