The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nephew said Friday that he did not think that President Donald Trump was "a racist in the traditional sense" — but was more "racially ignorant or racially uninformed."
"The president said to me that he's not the guy being described in the media," Isaac Newton Farris Jr. told CNN outside the White House after Trump signed a proclamation honoring the King holiday on Monday.
"I don't think that President Trump is a racist in the traditional sense as we know in this country.
"I think President Trump is racially ignorant or racially uninformed," Farris explained. "But I don't think that he's a racist in the traditional sense."
Trump had been widely slammed since The Washington Post reported Thursday that he had referred to Haiti, El Salvador and Africa as " s**thole countries" in a bipartisan meeting with senators on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Trump denied making the derogatory comments on Twitter Friday, only saying that "the language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used."
Before signing the King proclamation Friday, Trump said: "We celebrate Dr. King for standing up for the self-evident truth Americans hold so dear, that no matter the color of our skin, or the place of our birth we are all created equal by God."
Besides Ferris, the president was flanked by Vice President Mike Pence, Health and Human Services Secretary Ben Carson and other King family members.
Farris told CNN's Jim Acosta that Trump had talked privately with him, Pence and Carson in the Oval Office before the ceremony.
He said afterward that his take on of Trump's racial perspective "means that we have him until 2020 or until something else happens."
President Trump later tweeted on the event:
The Associated Press contributed to this report.