Former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele on Monday slammed President Donald Trump for making race relations worse in the United States.

“On race, as I’ve looked at it… particularly the Charlottesville period… what I saw the president do effectively and what he did throughout the campaign was pick at the scab of race,” Steele said during a discussion on MSNBC. “Picked at it, picked at it, picked at it until it became a wound again.”

ADVERTISEMENT

“The healing process that had begun in the 50s and 60s with the marches, the great speeches by [Martin Luther] King, certainly the assassination of leaders, all of that came flashing back for a lot of people.”

In Charlottesville, “you saw young men in their early 20s in their nicely tailored suits — not hoods, not with torches, but with tiki torches — out saying and protesting and claiming the same thing around the issue of race that our parents and our grandparents had to deal with,” he continued.

Steele said that normally Americans would turn to the president for leadership, but in this case “he was the man who was picking at the scab.”

Watch video below: