The mayor of Tangier Island, Va., said this week that he spoke with President Trump by phone recently about the status of the sinking island, but remarked that the president “isn’t really a sea-level-rise guy.”

The exchange was reported by CNN after the news network profiled Tangier, an island located in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. The island is currently being ravaged by rising sea levels and erosion and is expected to wash away in as little as 20 years.

The mayor of the island, James Eskridge, told CNN that Trump called him one day at his home after “one of his staff members told him he heeded to see this CNN report on Tangier.”

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Trump reportedly thanked Eskridge for the support of the island’s residents, 90 percent of whom voted for him in the 2016 election. He also thanked Eskridge personally after hearing of the mayor's support in the CNN story.

Eakridge said he and Trump talked for about 10 minutes, saying that Trump seemed “down to earth.”

“The president isn’t really a sea-level-rise guy,” Eskridge said. The mayor said he and Trump talked about the threats facing the island, including erosion and tropical storms.

"The sea level rise, I just don't see it," Eskridge told the network. "The reason we're focused on erosion is because we can see it. Erosion will take us away long before sea level rise will."

"I think he was mainly focusing on the sea-level-rise part of it," the mayor maintained in an interview with Jake Tapper. "Sea-level-rise may be occurring, but it's such a slow pace and the erosion, the effects from the erosion, we can see almost weekly."

Eskridge said he and Trump didn’t get to discuss solutions for helping the island to survive, including a potential sea wall, but he says Trump invited him to “stop by” the White House if he were ever in Washington.

Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate change agreement earlier this month and several administration officials have refused commenting on whether Trump believes in climate change.