President Donald Trump lit into Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Thursday evening, calling him a “loser in life” and demanding that he be expelled from Congress.
Trump shared a post from Fox News host Mark Levin on Truth Social that said Raskin should be expelled because he’s “leading a plot to impeach” the president and due to his role as the lead manager of Trump’s second impeachment trial, among other things.
“I agree with Mark Levin when he says to, EXPEL THE BUM,” Trump added as he shared a screenshot of Levin’s post. “Congress can never be great with people like this, who suffer massively from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), casting their vote of HATE!”
Trump also said that if Raskin hadn’t been given a preemptive pardon by then-President Joe Biden, “he’d be in jail right now!”
Biden issued the pardons to members of the Jan. 6 committee and others to protect them from “revenge” by Trump.
Raskin is a frequent critic of the president. Just last month, he publicly accused Trump of using the Oval Office to enrich himself.
“We’ve never seen abuse like the kind of abuse that has taken place under Donald Trump,” he said at the time.
Raskin has called on Trump to face a “comprehensive cognitive assessment” amid growing questions about the president’s health.
“We have indisputably entered the realm of profound medical difficulty and concern,” Raskin said in April.
Raskin has also been vocal about the president’s ties to late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who was once a close Trump friend, and has demanded the full release of the Epstein files.
Raskin said earlier this year that a search for Trump’s name in the unredacted files that lawmakers had access to turned up “more than a million results.”
While both the House and Senate have the power to expel members, doing so requires a two-thirds vote from the chamber in question, making it extremely rare. Only three lawmakers ― all members of the House ― have been expelled since the Civil War. The most recent was former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) after he was charged with fraud. Santos was ultimately convicted in a criminal trial and sentenced to 87 months in prison, but served just three months before Trump commuted his sentence.