Rep. Rashida Tlaib Calls Trump a ‘Motherf-cker’ While Promising Impeachment
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) made history in November when she became the first Muslim woman to win a seat in Congress. Not long after she and her new colleagues passed a continuing resolution to re-open the government without funding for a border wall, Tlaib on Thursday night spoke at a MoveOn reception for the new Congress near Capitol Hill. She was pretty excited. “People love you and you win, and when your son looks at you and says, ‘Mama, look, you won. Bullies don’t win.’ I said, ‘Baby, they don’t, because we’re going to go in there and we’re going to impeach the motherfucker,'” she said to raucous applause.
Congresswoman @RashidaTlaib tells cheering crowd that Trump impeachment coming
“We’re going to go in and impeach the motherfucker” pic.twitter.com/oQJYqR78IA
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) January 4, 2019
President Trump appeared to respond on Friday morning, arguing that Democrats only want to impeach him because he has been so successful.
As I have stated many times, if the Democrats take over the House or Senate, there will be disruption to the Financial Markets. We won the Senate, they won the House. Things will settle down. They only want to impeach me because they know they can’t win in 2020, too much success!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2019
How do you impeach a president who has won perhaps the greatest election of all time, done nothing wrong (no Collusion with Russia, it was the Dems that Colluded), had the most successful first two years of any president, and is the most popular Republican in party history 93%?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2019
Thursday night wasn’t the first time Tlaib has advocated for impeaching Trump. “I keep telling people this is about electing a jury that will impeach him, and I make a heck of a juror,” she told The Hill in April, when she was still vying to replace John Conyers Jr., the longtime congressman who resigned in December 2017 amid sexual harassment allegations.
Tlaib reiterated her position in December, calling for Trump’s impeachment after he threatened to shut down the government over border wall funding, and again after he followed through on the threat. “No matter what this President says or does, it seems to take our focus away from the harm & pain we allow him to cause our people,” she tweeted. “He wins when we do it. I am going to stay focused & hopefully that will lead my colleagues to see that impeachment is in order.”
A handful of Democratic lawmakers have called for the president’s impeachment, and though the party’s leaders have been wary of the idea, they aren’t discounting it. Newly minted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said on the Today Show Thursday that it could depend on the results of the special counsel’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. “We have to wait and see what happens with the Mueller report,” she explained. “We shouldn’t be impeaching for a political reason, and we shouldn’t avoid impeachment for a political reason. So we’ll just have to see how it comes.”
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), the new chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees impeachment proceedings, has also been careful when discussing the idea of forcing Trump out of office. “Impeachment is designed as a defense of the republic against a president who would aggrandize power, destroy liberty, destroy Democratic institutions, destroy the separations of power,” he told CBS on Wednesday. “If that happens, if you get real evidence of that, then you have to consider impeachment hearings.” He added, “we’ll have to wait and see what the Mueller investigation comes up with and other investigations looking into it.”
On Thursday morning, Nadler distanced himself from Tlaib’s comments. “I don’t like that language,” he said. “More to the point, I disagree with what she said. It is too early to talk about that intelligently. We have to follow the facts and get the facts.“
House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler to @JohnBerman on Rashida Tlaib impeachment comments. “I don't like that language. More to the point, I disagree with what she said. It is too early to talk about that intelligently. We have to follow the facts and get the facts.“
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) January 4, 2019
A lawmaker calling for Trump’s impeachment is nothing new. Tlaib wasn’t even the only one to do it on Thursday. As soon as the 116th Congress was in session, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) re-introduced a resolution to impeach the president that he and two other Democratic lawmakers first brought to the House in 2017. “There is no reason it shouldn’t be before the Congress,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Every day, Donald Trump shows that leaving the White House would be good for our country.”
But Tlaib’s enthusiastic will likely rankle conservatives because of her use of profanity. Tlaib doesn’t care.
I will always speak truth to power. #unapologeticallyMe
— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) January 4, 2019
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