On the heels of a tweet from President Donald Trump on Tuesday morning where he compared the ongoing impeachment inquiry against him to “a lynching,” White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley offered a defense that completely skirted the issue at hand.

While talking to reporters outside the White House, Gidley said that Trump wasn’t “comparing what’s happened to him with one of our darkest moments in American history.” Thousands of Black Americans were killed by lynch mobs in the Jim Crow-era South.

“I understand that there are many people in the media who don’t agree with his language,” said Gidley. “He has used many words to describe the way he’s been relentlessly attacked.”

The spokesman went on to say that Trump has done “many things” to help African-American communities.