A campaign chair for Donald Trump in Ohio who blamed President Barack Obama for racism in an interview published Thursday has apologized and resigned.
“My personal comments were inappropriate,” Kathy Miller said, according to the Columbus Dispatch. “I am not a spokesperson for the campaign and was not speaking on its behalf. I have resigned as the volunteer campaign chair in Mahoning County and as an elector to the Electoral College to avoid any unnecessary distractions.”
Miller, who chairs Trump’s campaign in Mahoning County, had said in an interview with the Guardian that she didn’t “think there was any racism until Obama got elected.”
Miller said that before Obama’s term, “we never had problems like this.”
“Now with the people with the guns and shooting up neighborhoods and not being responsible citizens, that’s a big change and I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America,” she said. “I think that’s all his responsibility.”
The Ohio state director for Trump’s campaign, Bob Paduchik, said Thursday that he had accepted Miller’s resignation, the Dispatch reported.
The publication of Miller’s comments followed a second night of protests in Charlotte, North Carolina over the police-involved shooting of Keith Scott, an African-American man who his family claimed was reading a book in his car before he was he was killed by police. Officers, who disputed the family’s account and said he was armed, had used batons and tear gas to push back protestors on the first night.
Miller, who said she works in the real estate industry, suggested in the Guardian interview that black people were to blame if they had not succeeded in life.
“If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault,” she said. When a Guardian reporter brought up the disadvantages African-Americans face because of the color of their skin, Miller disagreed.
“You had all the advantages,” she said. “They got into schools without the same grades as a white kid… We have three generations of all still having unwed babies, kids that don’t go through high school, I mean, when do they take responsibility for how they live?”
Mahoning County, which is home to about 230,000 people in northeast Ohio, is about 81 percent white and 16 percent black, according to the 2010 U.S. Census.
When asked about black voters in the county, Miller told the Guardian, “that’s a smaller percentage of our population… I don’t know that they’re voting.”
She also suggested that their lower turnout at the voting booth might be connected to “the way they were raised,” the Guardian reported.
Trump has attempted to improve his standing among African-Americans, who have overwhelmingly rejected the Republican nominee in polls, by meeting with African-American leaders and delivering speeches on how his policies would affect minorities. Last week, the candidate traveled to the majority-black city of Flint, Michigan in an overture that went awry when a black pastor interrupted him during a Clinton tirade to focus on the water crisis plaguing the city.
Miller, in her Guardian interview, later chided the reporter for bringing up the issue of racism.
“About the racism, get off that topic,” she said. “It’s of no consequence… If people have jobs and go to work and do what they’re supposed to do, there is no racism.”
Some black people who might disagree with her, she added, would only do so “because they’re not going to work.”
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