We’ve all got to draw the line somewhere. Donald Trump’s White House transition team has blasted former Trump co-chairman Carl Paladino’s disgusting comments about Barack and Michelle Obama after he said that his wish for them in 2017 was for the President to die and for the First Lady to go live with a gorilla. Paladino, currently a Buffalo, NY developer and member of the school board, previously worked for Trump during his New York State election campaign. He ran for governor of New York in 2010.

“Carl’s comments are absolutely reprehensible, and they serve no place in our public discourse,” the transition team said in a statement, per The Washington Post. The Buffalo-based alternative weekly newspaper Artvoice asked 42 locals, including Paladino, what their wishes were for next year. Paladino responded that he wanted Obama to die of mad cow disease and for Michelle to “return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe” to live “in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.”

New York governor Andrew Cuomo released a statement on Friday calling Paladino’s remarks “racist, ugly, and reprehensible.”

Buffalo News reports that Paladino claims his comments came from frustration over how Obama handled the crisis in Aleppo, and called him the worst president in history. “Yeah, I’m not politically correct,” he said. “They asked what I want and I told them.” He later issued a statement saying that his comments had “nothing to do with race,” and that the outrage is “the typical stance of the press when they can’t otherwise defend the acts of the person being attacked.”

There is, of course, a line to be drawn between being “politically incorrect,” and being rude, offensive, and disgraceful, just like there’s a line between criticizing a politician’s policies over international crises and lobbing childish personal attacks to get attention.