A major donor just dragged Trump’s Florida Governor candidate into vile anti-Obama racism scandal

The party of Trump is once again deeply embroiled in racist controversy, according to a new report from POLITICO. An influential Republican donor who gave over $20,000 to GOP’s Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis has been exposed for recently penning a tweet calling former President Obama a Muslim and a racial slur.

“F—- MUSLIM N—-” tweeted Steven M. Alembik, the man who previously helped arrange for DeSantis to speak at Mar-a-Lago. The tweet was a response to an RNC tweet which Alembik quoted which read “Without a hint of irony, Obama smears President Trump’s 63 million Republican voters as divisive & resentful.” Alembik’s tweet has since been deleted.

Alembik insisted to POLITICO that he simply wrote the tweet in anger and claimed he’s “absolutely not” racist, a surprising statement from a man who spewed such vile racist filth for the entire world to see.

Tellingly, Alembik trotted out the shopworn defense of racists caught using the N-word. POLITICO reports that Alembik claims there’s a “double standard for white people when it came to using the N-word.”

The statement is, of course, rubbish. There is a world of difference between Black Americans using the word to reclaim it and divest it of its damaging power and white men like Alembik using it demean people on the basis of race. Clearly, Alembik doesn’t see it that way.

“So somebody like Chris Rock can get up onstage and use the word and there’s no problem? But some white guy says it and he’s a racist? Really? I grew up in New York in the ‘50s. We were the k—-. They were the n——. They were the goyim. And those were the s—-,” Alembik said.

In the past, Alembik compared the high number of Jewish Nobel Prize winners with Muslims in an unfavorable light for the latter group. He claims that he’s not Islamaphobic but admitted that the comments look to be anti-Muslim. “Of course they would. But it’s not meant to be. These are just the statistics and the facts … I’m not anti-Muslim. I’m anti-people-trying-to-kill me,” he said.

DeSantis’s campaign has unsurprisingly begun to distance itself from the man from whom it received such a sizeable chunk of money. “We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: we adamantly denounce this sort of disgusting rhetoric,” Stephen Lawson, a spokesman for the campaign, insisted in an official statement.

Additionally, the campaign says that the Friend of Ron DeSantis political committee in June returned $11,000 in donations to Alembik. That said, another $2,000 he contributed has not been returned to him. Alembik claims that he asked for the money back himself because of an accounting error and an accident involving the wrong bank account. Since 2015, Alembik has contributed a net $11,920 to DeSantis.

DeSantis himself came under fire recently when he decided to use the phrase “monkey this up” when referring to how his black, Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum would damage the state. The choice of wording was understandably interpreted by many as a bigoted attack.

Now that Alembik’s tweets have surfaced, critics who have accused the DeSantis campaign of racism have even firmer ground to stand on. Where there’s dog whistle smoke, there’s racist fire and a man who associates with men like Alembik has no place in the Florida Governor’s Mansion.

Click here to donate to Democrat Andrew Gillum.

Original reporting by Marc Caputo at POLITICO.