As fallout continues over the president's offensive language during a closed-door meeting in the Oval Office, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) argued that Donald Trump's specific word choice is irrelevant—"he has a long history of racism"—and that in the year ahead the public must "organize, organize, organize" to defeat his agenda.

Speaking to MSNBC's "All In" on Monday, Ellison, who also serves as co-chair of the DNC, said that "whether [Trump] said 'shithole' or 'shithouse,' he has deprecated people and people of color, people who are Muslim, people who are Mexican. He has done it for literally years."

The task at hand should be to decide "what are we going to do about it," he said.

The Commander-in-Chief of the United States has racist ideas and is pursuing a racist agenda. That's extremely dangerous. Our job in 2018 is to organize, organize, organize for the country we know we can be. pic.twitter.com/wCpnOxuxAo — Rep. Keith Ellison (@keithellison) January 16, 2018 SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Never Miss a Beat. Get our best delivered to your inbox.







Given that "this guy is a commander-in-chief...[and] controls the largest military economy and surveillance in the world," Ellison said Trump's "racism is dangerous to people. And we've all got to step up and deal with that."

"All we see out of this president is that he's doing mean, hateful things to people, or he's demanding his vanity be assuaged. We are in a constitutional crisis right now," Ellison warned, and said, "2018 is a year where if you love this country and the people in, it everybody has got to organize, organize, organize and get very busy. Figure out how you can be involved to restore the proper balance in our country."