Fox News anchor Shepard Smith asked chief White House correspondent John Roberts if he had any memory of a president speaking of a sitting member of Congress like President Trump has of Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
Roberts evoked a Civil War-era incident in response.
During a recap of the 29-minute press conference that Trump held Tuesday in the Oval Office, Shepard Smith touched on the pejorative description Trump had made of Tlaib. Referencing the disruptive behavior that led her to be forcibly ejected from one of his 2016 rallies, Trump described Tlaib as “violent,” “vicious,” and “out of control.” He went on to ridicule her for crying at her recent press conference, saying “I don’t buy it,” and also mocked her for bringing her grandmother into her recent controversy with the Israeli government.
“You’ve been a correspondent for decades,” Smith told Roberts. “I wonder if you’ve ever heard of a sitting president call a sitting member of Congress ‘violent,’ ‘vicious,’ and ‘out of control’?”
“I have not, Shep,” Roberts reflected. “But I believe that back in the 1800s, you could probably find a number of cases of that happening. Don’t forget — and I can’t remember the people who were involved — but there was one member of Congress who took a cane to another member of Congress in the chamber. So maybe this is a return to the way things used to be. I don’t know, but it certainly is different than it has been for the past few decades.”
Roberts was referencing the “Brooks-Sumner Affair” of 1856, in which pro-slavery Democratic Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina caned abolitionist Republican Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Senate floor, after Sumner delivered a fiery oration against slavery three days before. The incident became an infamous symbol of “the breakdown of reasoned discourse,” and a harbinger of civil war.
