Updated at 7:25 p.m. with Trump campaign comment.

WASHINGTON — An uproar swept through the capital Tuesday after the president complained that he’s the victim of a political “lynching."

Black lawmakers, in particular, expressed outrage as Donald Trump equated the impeachment inquiry to the hangings of slaves and former slaves by mobs in the Deep South as a method of punishment and intimidation.

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Dallas Democrat who chairs the House science committee, said she was “troubled” by Trump’s comment. She recalled the 1916 lynching in her hometown, Waco, in which a black field hand was lynched after the murder of a white farmer’s wife. The incident known as the Waco Horror galvanized national sentiment to end such attacks.

"I lived in a city where one of the most famous lynching incidents in U.S. history happened. Mr. President, you’re no victim,” she said in a statement issued by her office.

“Stop trying to use this racist language to try to incite violence and distract the American people from the real truth — you abused the power of the highest office for your personal gain. You are a criminal,” tweeted Rep. Marc Veasey, a Fort Worth Democrat and a fellow member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Stop trying to use this racist language to try to incite violence and distract the American people from the real truth—you abused the power of the highest office for your personal gain. You are a criminal. — Rep. Marc Veasey (@RepVeasey) October 22, 2019

Two other black caucus members from Houston, also Democrats, blistered Trump after his morning tweet complaining about a lack of fairness in the House inquiry. In the latest revelation, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine reportedly told lawmakers Tuesday afternoon that Trump froze security aid and refused to meet with Ukraine’s new president until he promised to publicly announce a corruption probe aimed at tarnishing Joe Biden, the Democratic front-runner for president in 2020.

“All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here — a lynching,” Trump wrote Tuesday morning.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee denounced the “abject grotesqueness" of Trump’s words, and noted that “stoking racial discord and furthering internal American dissent is just another page out in Russians’ playbook” — yet more reason, in her view, to pursue impeachment.

Rep. Al Green took to the House floor, where he accused Trump of “continuing to weaponize hate and bigotry" by equating mob murder to impeachment.

“Does he not know that thousands of African-Americans were lynched?” Green said. “How dare the president compare Article 2 section 4 of the Constitution, a lawful constitutional process, to mob violence. ... This makes you no better than those who were screaming `blood and soil’ [a Nazi slogan] and `Jews will not replace us’ [a white supremacist slogan],” during a march in Charlottesville, Va., that led to violent clashes with counter-protesters. “It makes you no better than those who burn crosses. It makes you no better than those who wear hoods and white robes. Do you not understand?”

In this March 3, 1910, photo, a mob of 10,000, many of them children, stand shoulder to shoulder around Allen Brooks, a black man, who was lynched from a telephone pole at Elm and Akard streets in downtown Dallas. For many years, a novelty postcard of the photo, the only memorial to Brooks, was popularly mailed from Dallas. The postcard is on display at the African American Museum in Dallas,

Green has pushed for impeachment from the outset of Trump’s presidency, prompting death threats.

“Try it and we’ll lynch all you f---ing n----rs, you’ll be hanging from a tree,” was the message in one voicemail he received in May 2017.

Trump has repeatedly, and as recently as Monday, accused Green of pursuing impeachment solely because Democrats cannot oust him fairly in the 2020 election. Green has denied that and has only ever framed his demand in terms of Trump’s fitness for office, and actions he views as misdeeds.

Rep. Will Hurd of San Antonio, the only black Republican in the House, told CNN that he felt Trump’s comments showed racial insensitivity.

On this day where we are forced to consider the abject grotesqueness of words spewed by @realdonaldtrump, a reminder that stoking racial discord and furthering internal American dissent is just another page out in Russians' playbook. #ImpeachmentInquiry https://t.co/1vqTmaFRLv — Sheila Jackson Lee (@JacksonLeeTX18) October 22, 2019

The Trump campaign accused Democrats of selective memories, dusting off instances of politicians from their side using the term in the same way.

After Joe Biden called Trump’s comment “abhorrent” and “despicable,” the Trump campaign rapid response director Andrew Clark noted that in 1998, as a senator, Biden had referred to impeachment of Bill Clinton as a “partisan lynching.” Video here.

At the White House, deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley rejected complaints about his boss’s comment, blaming the outcry on a hostile news media despite the widespread criticism from elected officials.

“The president’s not comparing what’s happened to him with one of our darkest moments in American history. He’s just not,“ Gidley told reporters. "What he’s explaining clearly is the way he’s been treated by the media since he announced for president.“

“The word impeachment was used about this president the day he was elected and before he was even sworn into office,” he added. “I understand there are many people in the media who don’t agree with his language. He has used many words to describe the way he has been relentlessly attacked.”

Gidley also insisted that Trump’s record on race relations is exemplary. “If you want to talk about what the president has done for the African-American community I would love to have that conversation because there are many things, there are many things he has done," he said.

Trump critics would dispute that. They have long accused him of occasionally echoing the rhetoric of white supremacists. He drew fierce criticism after Charlottesville, for insisting there were “fine people” on both sides of a clash that included torch-bearing demonstrators chanting Nazi and white supremacist slogans.

In this May 15, 1916 image provided by the Texas Collection at Baylor University, thousands gather for the torture and burning of field hand Jesse Washington in front of Waco City Hall, shortly after his murder conviction days after the slaying of Lucy Fryer, the white wife of a nearby farmer. The photographic record of the lynching in progress prompted widespread condemnation of the "Waco Horror." The incident stood as a turning point in national anti-lynching efforts and helped bring to prominence the NAACP, the nation's oldest civil rights organization. (Fred Gildersleeve/Texas Collection at Baylor University via AP) (Fred Gildersleeve / AP)

Texas’ Republican senators shrugged off the controversy.

“Obviously that’s hyperbole," Sen. John Cornyn told Politico at the Senate.

Sen. Ted Cruz agreed that the term Trump used comes with “significant historical freight.” But he said, "The connotation the president is carrying forward is a political mob seeking an outcome regardless of facts. And that I think is an objectively true description of what is happening in the House right now.”

Sen. Lindsay Graham insisted that the president’s choice of words doesn’t only carry a racial meaning. “I’m from South Carolina I understand it very well. Mob rule is what lynching is all about,” he said.

But other Republicans were appalled. Sen. John Thune of North Dakota, the No. 2 Senate Republican leader, called it “inappropriate.”

Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida whose 2016 presidential hopes Trump dashed with mockery of his “low energy," called Trump’s comment grotesque.

“The President is not a victim,” Bush tweeted. “He should be the most powerful person on the planet. To equate his plight to lynching is grotesque.”

The President is not a victim. He should be the most powerful person on the planet. To equate his plight to lynching is grotesque. https://t.co/ZECeswGlWx — Jeb Bush (@JebBush) October 22, 2019

The controversy has become instant fodder in some of the most contested congressional races in Texas.

Mike Siegel, one of the Democrats vying for a shot at Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, retweeted a comment calling it “vile, offensive, and wrong” to equate impeachment, “a legal process endorsed by the Constitution” to "racist terrorism.”

McCaul did not weigh in on Trump’s comment.

No sir! No, @realdonaldtrump: this is NOT a lynching, and shame on you for invoking such a horrific act that was used as a weapon to terrorize and murder African Americans.



If you want to know what lynching actually looks like, go to @eji_org in Montgomery, Alabama https://t.co/hqlYI0MyaQ — Doug Jones (@DougJones) October 22, 2019

Sen. Doug Jones, an Alabama Democrat, tweeted at the president: “Shame on you for invoking such a horrific act that was used as a weapon to terrorize and murder African Americans.” Jones urged him to visit a museum in Montgomery, Ala., dedicated to the slave trade, racial terrorism and the Jim Crow South for a lesson on what lynching actually looks like.

This yr marks the 100th anniv. of the Red Summer of 1919, when hundreds of African Americans were lynched and murdered across the country. Thousands more would follow. Lynching was used to beat Black people as far back into slavery as possible. The president is not being lynched. pic.twitter.com/0DQbYZmYE8 — Trymaine Lee (@trymainelee) October 22, 2019

According to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, “More than 4400 African American men, women, and children were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950.”