Since Trump declared his candidacy last summer, he has paid about 120 people on his campaign, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Over the weekend, the campaign reported about 70 people drawing salaries, a number that did not include a few dozen more working as consultants. A slew of hires in early August were not yet reflected in Trump’s filings.
The Associated Press examined the social media feeds of more than 50 current and former campaign employees who helped propel Trump through the primary elections. The campaign has employed a mix of veteran political operatives and outsiders. Most come across as dedicated, enthusiastic partisans, but at least seven expressed views that were overtly racially charged, supportive of violent actions or broadly hostile to Muslims.
A graphic designer for Trump’s advance team approvingly posted video of a black man eating fried chicken and criticizing fellow blacks for ignorance, irresponsibility and having too many children. A Trump field organiser in Virginia declared that Muslims were seeking to impose Sharia law in America and that “those who understand Islam for what it is are gearing up for the fight.”
The AP’s findings come at a time when Trump is showing new interest in appealing to minority voters, insisting he will be fair in dealing with the 11 million people in the US illegally and explicitly pitching himself to African-Americans, saying “what do you have to lose?”
The AP was able to review the accounts of only a minority of Trump staffers: Others set their accounts to private, some could not be found or identified with confidence as Trump campaign employees.
One month ago, the AP sent written questions to the Trump campaign with examples of the posts. The campaign has not commented, despite several requests since.
Veteran Republican campaign operatives said keeping an eye on staffers’ social media postings has long been a standard practice.
AP found little questionable content in the ranks of Trump’s top officials. The campaign’s social media director, Dan Scavino, tweets prolifically but avoids discussing race and religion. Field organisers representing Trump’s campaign around the country, however, have had no such reservations, either before or during their employment with the campaign. Their judgement matters beyond the campaign because the paid staff of winning presidential candidates often receives jobs in the next administration.
Teresa Unrue, a field organiser and graphic designer in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for Trump’s advance team, shared a video on her Facebook account July 11 — the week before the Republican National Convention — of a black man eating fried chicken while shaming fellow black people.
“Why are you mad about slavery?” the man asks. “Y’all weren’t no damn slaves.”
“Had me crack’n up!! Thank you!” Unrue wrote of the video. “Please share this with people.”
In a short phone conversation, Unrue said she tried to keep her personal social media comments positive and referred questions to the campaign.
Some posts fixated on stories of black-on-white violence with claims that news about such crimes was being suppressed.
Secretary of State John Kerry to be hanged
“How about this little white boy being murdered by a black man,” grassroots organiser Annie Marie Delgado of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, wrote in December 2014 post, one of a number highlighting crimes against white people before Trump declared his candidacy. Delgado also shared a discredited, hoax photo of the State Department’s Kerry with Jane Fonda, and commented: “I say hang them!” She was paid $11,146 through April, according to campaign records.
Fear or dislike of Muslims was a recurring theme. Though Trump at one point proposed temporarily barring foreign Muslims from entering the country and scrutinising the activities of mosques, he has sometimes distinguished Islamic extremists who pose a risk and those who don’t. “I love the Muslims,” Trump said in September, expressing willingness to appoint one to his Cabinet.
Islam a barbaric cult
On Facebook, Mark Kevin Lloyd of Lynchburg, Virginia, who has been paid $36,000 as Trump’s field director in the state, shared a post June 30 calling Islam “a barbaric cult.” He shared a meme June 16, four days after the Orlando nightclub shooting by a heavily armed Muslim who professed allegiance to the Islamic State group. The meme said people should be forced to eat bacon before they can purchase firearms.
Lloyd declined to talk to the AP without the Trump campaign’s permission, citing his nondisclosure agreement with the campaign.
Other campaign staffers also singled out Muslims for special scrutiny.
Unrue shared the statement, “We need Islam control, not gun control.”
During her time with the campaign, Delgado deplored the appointment of a Muslim-American judge in New York.
“Step by step... this is how American culture will end,” she wrote Feb. 27, saying it was only reasonable to believe that the judge would implement Sharia law.
Delgado said in a telephone interview she stopped working for the campaign in April. She said she did not recall making some of the posts the AP asked her about and does not stand by others.
“If I read the whole thing, I probably wouldn’t have posted it,” she said of one post she shared, a short essay declaring that Muslims are inherently incapable of being good Americans.
A meme mocking Muslim sympathiser
Phillip Dann, a field organiser in Massachusetts who recently relocated to Florida, was paid $6,153 between January and March. He shared a meme mocking “Muslim sympathisers.” He also shared an article about Trump threatening to bring back waterboarding “or worse,” and added “where is the gasoline?” Dann told the AP in a phone interview he had no antipathy against Muslims in general.
Dann attributed inflammatory comments of other Trump staffers to the fact that the campaign had drawn on people inexperienced in politics. While he has been politically active for decades — originally as a leftist, he said — he described the field staff Trump acquired in the primary as unfamiliar with traditional campaign rules.
“We get hired because there was no one left,” Dann said. In a later email, he acknowledged some of his and other staff postings were “clearly over the top” — but said that criticism of the posts would amount to intimidation.
Scott Barrish, who earned $12,250 as Trump’s political director for the Tampa Bay, Florida, region, took his views beyond social media posts. In 2011, he drew local press coverage for writing to the head of the nonprofit Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group for Muslims in the US, saying he was wise to its plans to establish a totalitarian theocracy in the United states.
“This is us v you,” wrote Barrish. “In the great words of the late President Ronald Reagan, ‘I win, you lose!’”
Separately, Barrish tweeted in 2013 that he hoped America wasn’t headed for civil war, but “if our freedoms must be defended against a tyrannical government, so be it.”
“Those comments at that time were made by me and were my own personal view,” Barrish said in a brief interview with AP. He said he stopped working for Trump’s campaign after the Florida primary. “I don’t want to detract anything from the campaign.”
Conspiracy theories
Many accounts AP reviewed embraced conspiracy theories. Lloyd, the Virginia field director, said Obama is aiding the Iranian nuclear program as part of the president’s “’final solution’ to the Israel problem,” a phrase evoking the Holocaust.
Delgado, the Florida organiser, circulated a theory that the company Edible Arrangements LLC is funnelling money to Hamas, a claim that the Anti-Defamation League, a US Jewish organisation, has repeatedly dismissed as false.
Unrue posted a link to a website that alleged that the US government assassinated Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died earlier this year after a history of heart trouble.
Racially charged social media posts from Trump campaign employees and associates have already been a repeated source of embarrassment. Trump fired one adviser who had used a racial slur to describe Obama’s children, and the campaign denounced Trump’s longtime Mar-a-Lago butler for saying he would support dragging Obama from the White House and hanging him.
