President Donald Trump on Tuesday lashed out against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in an unhinged anti-impeachment letter in which he claims “more due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.”
The six-page letter, which kicks off with Trump accusing the Democrats of having “cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment,” reads like a Trump rally or a monologue one would hear on Trump pal and informal adviser Sean Hannity’s primetime Fox News show, replete with language about “illegal coups” and witch hunts.
While bragging about his 2016 electoral victory, however, the president takes a darkly personal and melodramatic turn—echoing the tone of his Fox News star friend’s TV and radio shows—asserting as fact that Pelosi hates democracy.
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“You are unwilling and unable to accept the verdict issued at the ballot box during the great Election of 2016,” Trump writes. “So you have spent three straight years attempting to overturn the will of the American people and nullify their votes. You view democracy as the enemy!”
At one point, the president directly addresses Pelosi: “It is a terrible thing you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I!” He adds: “You are offending Americans of faith by continually saying ‘I pray for the president’ when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense.”
Firing off adjective-laden complaints about the process throughout, the president quickly shifted his attention to the central charge behind his impeachment—his pressure campaign on the Ukrainian president to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Trump quickly turned the accusations against him back around on Biden—unsurprisingly also something viewers can expect to hear on a nightly basis from Hannity.
“You know full well that Vice President Biden used his office and $1 billion dollars of U.S. aid money to coerce Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who was digging into the company paying his son millions of dollars,” Trump writes. “You know this because Biden bragged about it on video. Now you are trying to impeach me by falsely accusing me of doing what Joe Biden has admitted he actually did.”
No Trump (or Hannity) tirade would be complete without an extended riff on the president’s accomplishments and 2016 electoral victory, which the Tuesday letter includes in spades. Besides well-worn chestnuts about “the lowest-ever unemployment for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans” and a “record stock market,” Trump boasts about the Space Force and pulling out of the “unfair and costly Paris Climate Accord.”
The president ends the written tantrum much the same way Hannity wraps up his nightly monologue: Via a near-stream-of-consciousness rant insisting that the American public will rise up against Democrats and soon remove them from office.
“I have no doubt the American people will hold you and the Democrats fully responsible in the upcoming 2020 election,” he declares. “They will not soon forgive your perversion of justice and abuse of power.”
Read the full letter below:
