On Cuomo Prime Time, CNN panelist Prof. Michael Eric Dyson and Republican strategist Patrick Griffin blasted Donald Trump Jr. for his retweet — since deleted — of a racist conspiracy theory that smeared Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris.

“I come here not to defend Trump or Donald Jr,. I come here because I think it was a mistake,” Griffin said of the offensive post from last Friday. “It never should have happened in the first place.”

After widespread outrage from both the left and the right — Meghan McCain, conservative co-host of The View called it out as “unquestionably racist,” — Trump Jr. took down the tweet. His spokesperson subsequently offered an excuse that the president’s son was merely unaware that Harris was half-Indian: “Once he saw that folks were misconstruing the intent of his tweet, he quickly deleted it.”

Host Chris Cuomo was not having it. “You don’t ask a question about the thing that you’re retweeting by accident,” he pointed out.

And this is not the first time that claims of propagating or legitimizing racism has hit Trump Jr. During the 2016 campaign, he gave a 20-minute interview to the host of a white supremacist radio show, which he later tried to disavow by calling it an accident. And earlier this year, he jokingly posted “Savage!!! Love my President” on Instagram, using a common racist trope about Native Americans in response to reply to his father that joked about genocide of American Indians.

“We don’t have to get Freudian here and say accidents don’t happen,” Dyson said. “They keep repeating it. This is a constant recurring theme with the president, inferential racism, implied racism. ‘Oh no, I’m not a racist, I don’t have a racist bone in my body,’ but those muscles are awful bigoted. The reality is we have to come to grips with the fact that the Republicans, especially the far right wing, has manipulated the symbolism of racial animus to their advantage, and then when they get caught on it, and get their hands caught with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar, they claim they didn’t want dessert. This is feeding and fueling a nasty, vicious, anti-black sentiment in this country that continues from the White House on down.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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