“I did a use a colorful phrase, but of course I don’t believe that the president is a card-carrying member of the KKK,” Jeffries said. “But it did capture a troubling pattern of racially insensitive and outrageous at times behavior that spans not months, not years, but decades.”

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Jeffries, who was elected to his leadership post in November, cited several examples from Trump’s past, including his insistence that the “Central Park Five” were guilty, even though DNA evidence exonerated them in the notorious 1989 rape case in New York.

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Jeffries also cited Trump’s advocacy of the “racist lie” told by “birthers” that president Barack Obama was born outside of the United States, as well as comments Trump made after a deadly clash at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

Jeffries noted that he has “consistently said no” when asked in the past whether he considers Trump a racist. But he said Trump’s “series of racially insensitive remarks” should not be ignored.

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“We cannot whitewash that. We cannot hide it,” the congressman said.

“We’ve got to have an opportunity for at least one day a year to have a candid, if sometimes uncomfortable, conversation about race,” Jeffries said. “Seems to me that we can’t have that conversation on Valentine’s Day, we can’t have that conversation on St. Patrick’s Day. It’s perhaps appropriate for us to have that difficult discussion on MLK Day when we’re celebrating the life and legacy or a champion for racial and social justice.”

At the event on Monday, sponsored by the National Action Network, Jeffries said “these are challenging times in the United States of America.”