House Minority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) fired back at President Donald Trump for a tweet evoking racist policing tactics from the 1960s, dismissing the president’s subsequent excuse, saying: “He knows what he is doing.”

Clyburn made his comments on CNN’s Erin Burnett: Outfront on Friday night, in response to Trump clearly going into damage control and attempting to clean up the widespread outrage from his early Friday morning tweet lashing out at the protest violence in Minneapolis, where he seemed to implicitly threaten that law enforcement or National Guard troops will shoot rioters, saying: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The incendiary tweet earned another rebuke from Twitter, which hid his post behind a warning label for “glorifying violence.”

“What do you make of the president trying to explain ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts?'” Burnett asked to start the segment.

“The president knows exactly what he is saying, he knows what he is doing” Clyburn fired back. “He has developed expertise in exciting people. So I don’t accept service upon the statements at all.”

“So I want to just make sure our viewers know here, obviously there’s just a blatant implication of when people are looting, you’re going to start shooting them,” Burnett said. “And the history, it appears to have originated in 1967. It was a comment made by the then Miami police chief and he announced a campaign against crime that included uses dogs and shut guns and he also said: ‘We don’t mind being accused of police brutality.’ And the pictures from 1968, he repeated the comment. When violence erupted in a predominantly black neighborhood in the 1968 convention: ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts.’ President Trump said he didn’t know about the history. Most people have heard it for a long time. Do you buy that?”

“No, I don’t,” Clyburn said bluntly. “When you talk about taking lives, because of the property crime, you take us back to a place in our history that gave rise to all of this. It may not have had the cute phrases like you just mentioned, but we all know what happened to people of color when they were accused of property crimes and that is what is going on here. And most of us know the background, the history, and this president knows the background and the history. So much of what he says is coded. And he means to send a signal to a certain element that he calls his base. And there are many people within that base who are not good people to say the least.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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