Rep. Byron Donalds said former President Donald Trump’s comments about Vice President Kamala Harris are being blown out of proportion.

The former president has come under fire in recent days for suggesting last week that Ms. Harris hid her blackness — her father is Jamaican and her mother Indian — until recently because of political convenience.

Mr. Donalds, who is Black, said Sunday that “I don’t really care [and] most people don’t” about the remarks, but still offered a qualified defense.

“This is really a phony controversy,” Mr. Donalds said on ABC’s “This Week” talk show. “But if we’re going to be accurate, when Kamala Harris went into the United States Senate, it was AP that said she was the Indian-American United States senator. It was actually played up a lot.”