A Republican activist who donated more than $20,000 to Ron DeSantis and lined up a speech for him at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club called President Obama a “F---- MUSLIM N----” on Twitter recently, in addition to other inflammatory remarks.
Steven M. Alembik told POLITICO Wednesday he wrote the Obama tweet in anger, that he’s “absolutely not” a racist and that he understood that DeSantis’s campaign for governor would need to distance himself from the comments — which the campaign promptly did.
“We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: we adamantly denounce this sort of disgusting rhetoric,” DeSantis campaign spokesman Stephen Lawson said in a written statement.
The controversy comes after DeSantis sent his campaign into a tailspin the day after the Aug. 28 primary by using the awkward phrase “monkey this up” in describing how the economy could falter under the plans of his opponent, Andrew Gillum, the Florida Democratic Party’s first African-American nominee for governor.
