“White nationalists are racists,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala. said on Tuesday afternoon after a months-long saga in which he pointedly refused to say just that.

Tuberville became the center of a spectacle on Capitol Hill that morning as the former football coach continued to dispute whether white nationalists were racist, drawing rebukes from members of both parties.

The story began with a May public radio interview in which he said the Pentagon was playing politics with the military by preventing white nationalists from joining the American armed forces. “Well, they call them that,” he said. “I call them Americans.”

In a CNN interview on Monday night, Tuberville was asked to clarify the remarks and said he rejected racism. But he later suggested that white nationalists weren’t by definition racists, despite many repeated attempts by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins to explain the meaning of the term. “Well, that’s your opinion,” he said.

A day later, he only dug in. “I’m totally against racism,” he told reporters. “If the Democrats want to say that white nationalists are racists, I’m totally against that, too.”