A county chairwoman for Donald Trump’s Ohio operation resigned from her post on Thursday after a video surfaced of her calling the Black Lives Matter movement a “stupid waste of time.”
“If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault,” Kathy Miller, who led get-out-the-vote efforts for Trump in Mahoning County, Ohio, told The Guardian in an interview published Thursday morning.
Miller also suggested that racism didn’t exist “until Obama got elected,” telling The Guardian “we never had problems like this.”
“Now, with the people with the guns, shooting up neighborhoods, not being responsible citizens, that’s a big change, and I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetrated on America. I think that’s all his responsibility,” she had said.
Hours after the interview went viral, Trump’s Ohio state director, Bob Paduchik, issued a statement saying he had accepted Miller’s resignation. She and other county chairs “are not spokespeople for the campaign,” Paduchik said.
Miller, who described her comments as “inappropriate” in her own statement, will be replaced by Tracy Winbush, another volunteer who’s been involved with the Trump campaign’s field operation in the crucial battleground state of Ohio.
Mahoning County is the tenth most-populated county in the Buckeye State, where Trump is 1.8 percentage points ahead of Hillary Clinton, according to the RealClearPolitics state-level polling average.
