On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Situation Room,” CNN Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta said President Trump “seems to harbor racist feelings about people of color, from other parts of the world” in response to the Washington Post‘s story about the president referring to Haiti, El Salvador, and countries in Africa as “sh*thole” countries.

After reading the statement the White House issued in response to the story, Acosta said, “Wolf, as you can tell from that statement, there’s no denial as to what the president said. They’re not denying that the president said this, in this statement. And so, we’re just going to have to press the White House further on this.”

He later added, “I almost have to think back to the day when we were at Trump Tower, when the president was commenting on Charlottesville, and he was saying that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ saying that there were ‘very fine people’ among the white supremacists and the Nazis, is that the president of the United States just seems to have a problem here, Wolf, in this area. And we can tiptoe around it, we can dance around it, and not really put our finger on it, but the president seems to harbor racist feelings about people of color, from other parts of the world. And it’s just a terrible thing to have come out of your mouth as a White House correspondent, or as a journalist. But if these comments are accurate, Wolf, I think it just is going to cause more damage, more grave damage to this presidency because it cuts to the very core of who he is. You just shouldn’t be referring to countries like that around the world in this manner. In the United States, as we’ve been talking about many, many times over the last several months, we bring in people from all parts of the world, and obviously, there are good, wonderful people who come from Haiti and from Africa and so on.”

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