House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries called President Donald Trump "the grand wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event, CNN reported.
Jeffries, a New York representative, has directed the nickname at the president several times over the past year, according to NBC News.
On Monday, he made the comparison during an event hosted by the National Action Network in New York in which several other prominent New York Democrats -- including Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillilbrand and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio -- also spoke.
"These are challenging times in the United States of America -- we have a hater in the White House, a birther in chief, the grand wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," Jeffries said. "One of the things that we've learned is that while Jim Crow may be dead, he still got some nieces and nephews that are alive and well."
Following the deadly protests in 2017 at Charlottesville, Virginia in which a woman died when white nationalists clashed with counterprotesters, Jeffries called the president a “racial arsonist’” for his handling of the event.
Jeffries told CNN at the time that the president’s reaction “was clearly inadequate, unacceptable, inappropriate, and for many people throughout America, led them to conclude that the president of the United States chose to pull the sheets off and reveal himself, in terms of his tendency to be a racial arsonist, fanning the flames of hatred.”
Jeffries explained what he meant by the term, that Trump “uses race to advance his own ends," which he said was troubling.
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