Just hours after lawmakers issued the first subpoena in the Trump impeachment inquiry, the president lashed out at House Democrats on Twitter, dubbing six members of Congress from racial and religious minority groups, "Do Nothing Democrat Savages."

"Can you imagine if these Do Nothing Democrat Savages, people like Nadler, Schiff, AOC Plus 3, and many more, had a Republican Party who would have done to Obama what the Do Nothings are doing to me," Trump Tweeted Saturday morning. "Oh well, maybe next time!"

Though 225 House Democrats and one House Republican have so far announced their support for the president’s impeachment, the lawmakers that Trump singled out as "savages" are all non-white, non-Christian, or both. House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff are both Jewish, while the congress members Trump referred to as "AOC Plus 3"—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar—are all women of color.

In July, Trump called for this same group of congresswomen to "go back" to the "broken and crime infested places from which they came," despite the fact that all are American citizens and three were born in this country. The comments, which invoked racist tropes that position Americans of color as not being true citizens of the nation, sparked a controversy over the president’s history of racist statements.

"Savage" has a long history as a racist term used to mark people of color as supposedly being less civilized than their white counterparts. It’s also a word Trump uses regularly, most often to refer to members of the gang MS-13.

Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke responded to the president’s tweet Saturday. "When he calls 6 members of Congress—all women of color or Jewish—‘savages,' he wants you to think of them as less than human," he wrote on Twitter. "Like when he calls immigrants an ‘infestation' and says 'no human being' would want to live in Baltimore. We can’t be surprised when violence follows."

Gabrielle Bruney Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture.

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