Rep. Hakeem Jeffries told CNN’s “New Day” on Wednesday that his language had been rhetorical and was intended as part of a larger conversation about racism in America. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Politics Jeffries says Trump isn't a racist but defends 'grand wizard' comparison

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries said Wednesday that he does not believe President Donald Trump — whom he referred to earlier this week as “the grand wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” — is a racist, only that he has a history of “racially insensitive remarks.”

At an event Monday marking Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the New York Democrat ripped Trump’s record on race relations, at one point labeling the president a “grand wizard,” the title for a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group that has terrorized black Americans since the 1800s.


“We have a hater in the White House. A birther in chief. The grand wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. One of the things that we've learned is that while Jim Crow may be dead, he’s still got some nieces and nephews that are alive and well,” Jeffries said at the MLK day event in New York.

Jeffries defended his language Wednesday on CNN, telling “New Day” interviewers that his language had been rhetorical and was intended as part of a larger conversation about racism in America. He said he did not regret tying the president to the nation’s most infamous hate group.

“With respect to the comments of a few days ago, we’ve got to have an opportunity for at least one day a year to have a candid — if sometimes uncomfortable — conversation about race,” he told anchor CNN Alisyn Camerota. “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 be able to have that difficult discussion on MLK Day, when we’re celebrating the life and legacy of a champion for racial and social justice.”

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Jeffries, an outspoken Democrat from Brooklyn whom some have identified as a potential future speaker of the House, said the “grand wizard” label was meant to encapsulate what he called “a troubling pattern of racially insensitive and outrageous, at times, behavior” by the president “that spans not months, not years, but decades.”

As evidence of Trump’s racially incendiary history, Jeffries cited allegations of discrimination against black and Latino housing applicants by the Trump Organization in the 1970s, the president’s nurturing of the debunked “birther” conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. and Trump’s proclamation after a deadly white nationalist rally in 2017 that there were “good people” on “both sides” of that day’s dueling protests.

“I did use a colorful phrase, but of course I don’t believe that the president is a card-carrying member of the KKK,” he said, noting that he’s shot down the notion that Trump is racist multiple times when asked about it.

Jeffries pushed back on the suggestion that his own rhetoric might serve only to inflame tensions more, expressing hope that Trump could change his tune and stop “peddling xenophobia out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

But he again insisted that “we cannot whitewash” Trump’s history “and on King Day we should be able to have that discussion.”

While Jeffries and other members of his party have often danced around flatly calling Trump a racist, Democrats — including some weighing 2020 presidential campaigns — were more vocal on this year’s MLK Day in denouncing the president's track record on race.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a likely 2020 presidential candidate, had no qualms about explicitly labeling Trump a racist.

“I must tell you, it gives me no pleasure to tell you that we have a president of the United States who is a racist,” Sanders told an MLK Day crowd in South Carolina, a key primary state with a majority black Democratic electorate. “What a president is supposed to do is to bring us together. And we have a president [who] intentionally, purposely, is trying to divide us up by the color of our skin, by our gender, by the country we came from, by our religion.”

Sanders appeared in South Carolina with Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who is also mulling a run, though Booker called for unity in more aspirational and generalized terms.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) announced Monday that she would mount a campaign to be the country's first black female president, later appearing at her alma mater, historically black Howard University, where she spoke about the importance of diversity.

And former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Vice President Joe Biden both spoke at a breakfast honoring King hosted by the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Biden used the event to denounce systemic racism, also telling the crowd that “we’ve learned in the last two years it doesn’t take much to awaken hate.”