A potential running mate for Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign is facing criticism for saying, “During Jim Crow, the Black family was together” — a remark that some, including at least one media outlet, interpreted as “Black people were better off under Jim Crow.”

During a speaking engagement Tuesday in Philadelphia, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Florida, told potential voters, “One of the things that’s actually happening in our culture, which you’re now starting to see in our politics, is the reinvigoration of Black families with younger Black men and Black women — and that is also helping to breed the revival of a Black middle class in America.”

“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together,” Donalds said. “During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative, because Black people always have always been conservative minded, but more Black people voted conservatively.”

On the House floor, Wednesday, Minority Leader U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-New York, offered a fiery response to Donalds’ comments, saying, “You better check yourself before you wreck yourself.”

“Speaker, it has come to my attention that a so-called leader has made the factually inaccurate statement that Black folks were better off during Jim Crow,” Jeffries said. “That’s an outlandish, outrageous and out of pocket observation.”

In an interview with CNN’s Abby Phillip on Wednesday, Donalds emphasized that he never stated that Black families were “better off” during Jim Crow.

“What you are dealing with right now is a political environment where anything I might say or any major surrogate might say, is going to be twisted into the lens of race,” Donalds said. “That was never the point.”

He also referred to the backlash from Jeffries and others as “gaslighting” and said his detractors “twist my words into saying something I never said.”

When pressed by Phillip to explain what he meant by the comments, Donalds said his point was that “Black families being together is a great thing for the Black community.”

“You do have to acknowledge the empirical fact that before Lyndon Johnson’s policies and the welfare state that was created in the United States … Black marriage rates were significantly higher, and they’re rising again in America; that’s a good thing.”