Certain Trump Campaign Staffers Love Sharing Racist, Violent Memes

The AP 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 organizer 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."

Phillip Dann, a field organizer in Massachusetts who recently relocated to Florida, was paid $6,153 between January and March. He shared a meme mocking "Muslim sympathizers." 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.

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 U.S., saying he was wise to its plans to establish a totalitarian theocracy in the United states. "This is us vs. 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." Barrish separately complained to editors at AP about its review of publicly accessible material on Trump employees' social media accounts, saying "the liberal media, yellow journalists are really grasping at straws with their ad hominem circumstantial logical fallacies!"