MS NOW anchor Al Sharpton argued President Donald Trump coordinated the upcoming UFC event on the White House lawn because he is nostalgic for a time when fights were staged to entertain slave masters.

Sharpton made his claim during an appearance on Morning Joe on Thursday. He started off by venting about recent GOP redistricting wins before tying it to UFC Freedom 250, which is being held on June 14 — which is also Trump’s 80th birthday.

“Trump and others are trying to bring us back to an America that we struggle to get out of,” Sharpton said, before struggling himself with the UFC’s name for a moment.

“So there is a connection of why they’re having these fights on the on the White House lawn — the UFO, whatever they call it, UFC and all that — because they’re trying to go back to that when, you know, they’d watch people have these fights for the slave masters and they’d be entertained by that. They’re literally going back to that.”

Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski then jumped in and said another example of the Trump administration’s apparent racism are the “ICE raids playing out on America’s streets.”

Sharpton kept going, saying Trump’s retrograde views on race should have been obvious during his first term, when he put a picture of “slave-owning” President Andrew Jackson up in the Oval Office.

“Why Jackson? That’s the kind of country he wants us to go back to — Andrew Jackson. And we must resist that with all we have,” Sharpton said.

Sharpton’s harsh claims about Trump come a week after UFC boss Dana White argued the complete opposite.

White told The New Yorker editor David Remnick that Trump wasn’t racist at all, and pointed to his longtime friendship with Michael Jackson to prove his point.

“The president had a very good relationship with Michael Jackson and had Michael Jackson around his kids all the time,” White said. “And you know, defended him when [accusations of sexual abuse were] going down. So to call the guy a racist is crazy. He’s not a racist.”

Watch above via MS NOW.

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