Intercept contributor Mehdi Hasan wasn’t all that shocked that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) downplayed President Donald Trump’s racism by claiming he’s being “lynched” by Democrats.

The racially charged word is generally used to refer to the century of abuse and murder people of color endured in the United States.

Many Republicans have come out against Trump’s usage of the word, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Graham, always one to defend the president, said that Trump was spot-on.

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“This is a lynching in every sense,” Graham said.

There are “4,743 people, according to the NAACP, murdered, lynched by a domestic terrorism campaign by white supremacists and Trump uses that word to describe impeachment,” began Hasan. “I’m as disgusted as Laura and I’m less dumbfounded because he’s a racist and when his back is up against the wall he does racist things. Did he tweet in this way because he was nudging and winking at those white supremacists in his base who show up at his rallies? Or did he tweet in this way because he is typically impulsive, racist and rude and crude on Twitter. It is an eternal mystery with Trump. You’re never quite sure if it is one or the other or both. But Lindsey Graham is the real villain of today.”

Tapper played the video of Graham defending the use of the word “lynching” to describe the impeachment.

“‘It is a lynching in every sense,’ is what he said,” Hassan exclaimed. “Every sense! Apart from the lynching sense of killing someone in the graphic way that Laura just described. It is ridiculous for a man from South Carolina, where, I think, 164 people were lynched in different counties and Graham was born the month before Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. I would say he should be ashamed of himself but clearly Lindsey Graham has no shame anymore.”

Laura Coates, who Hasan mentioned, recalled the disgusting ways in which white supremacists castrated, dragged, hanged, tortured, burned, set on fire and otherwise tortured people of color. Earlier Tuesday, MSNBC host Ali Velshi recalled one particular lynching where Mary Turner, a pregnant African American woman was hanged from her ankles, her stomach slashed open until her fetus fell out and the white men stomped on it until it was crushed.

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Watch the shocked and appalled commentators below: