In the wake of Donald Trump’s much-criticized comments following the events in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend, there has been a call for members of the Trump administration, particularly those of Jewish faith, to resign. On Saturday, my colleague William D. Cohan tweeted that economic adviser Gary Cohn had considered announcing his resignation on Friday, but resisted after Steve Bannon beat him to the punch. Earlier this week, a group of Yale graduates drafted a letter to their fellow alumnus Steven Mnuchin, informing him that it was his “moral obligation” to resign “in protest of President Trump’s support of Nazism and white supremacy.” Mnuchin, however, continues to defend the president’s response. “I don’t believe the allegations against the president are accurate,” Mnuchin said in a statement, as reported by Politico. “I believe that having highly talented men and women in our country surrounding the president in his administration should be reassuring to you and all the American people.”

Mnuchin said in his statement that he does not believe that Trump supports neo-Nazism, despite the fact that he failed to outright condemn the extremist groups present in Charlottesville last Saturday when he addressed the tragedy. “While I find it hard to believe I should have to defend myself on this, or the president,” Mnuchin said, “I feel compelled to let you know that the president in no way, shape or form, believes that neo-Nazi and other hate groups who endorse violence are equivalent to groups that demonstrate in peaceful and lawful ways.”

During the general election, Jared Kushner defended his boss and father-in-law against charges of race-baiting by invoking the “speech police.” More than a year later, the Treasury secretary took a similar tack. Mnuchin also said that he is “familiar with the culture wars being fought in our country. Some of these issues are far more complicated than we are led to believe by the mass media, and if it were so simple, such actions would have been taken by other presidents, governors, and mayors, long before President Trump was elected by the American people.”

Mnuchin finished his retort by criticizing those who continue to criticize Trump, asking them to stop distracting from the real issues, which apparently don’t include condemning in clear and precise terms the white supremacist groups that make up a good portion of Trump’s base. “Our president deserves the opportunity to propose his agenda and to do so without the attempts by those who opposed him in the primaries, in the general election, and beyond to distract the administration and the American people from these most important policy issues—jobs, economic growth, and national security,” Mnuchin said.