A Trump Field Director Was Fired for Being a White Nationalist

A white nationalist worked on the Trump campaign in an important position in Pennsylvania for five months — until Friday, when the Pennsylvania GOP fired him after learning about his views from my reporting.

Last week, I confirmed that Luke Meyer, the Trump campaign’s 24-year-old regional field director for Western Pennsylvania, goes by the online name Alberto Barbarossa. As Barbarossa, he co-hosts the Alexandria podcast with Richard Spencer, organizer of the 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. On his podcast and others, and in posts online, Barbarossa regularly shares white nationalist views.

“Why can’t we make New York, for example, white again? Why can’t we clear out and reclaim Miami?” Barbarossa asked while guest hosting a different white nationalist podcast in June. “I’m not saying we need to be 100 percent homogeneous. I’m not saying we need to be North Korea or Japan or anything like that. A return to 80 percent, 90 percent white would probably be, probably the best we could hope for, to some degree.”

After I presented Meyer with evidence that he was Barbarossa, he admitted the connection and said he has been hiding his online identity from his colleagues on Trump Force 47, the arm of the Trump campaign that runs volunteer organizers. “I am glad you pieced these little clues together like an antifa Nancy Drew,” he wrote in an email. “It made me realize how draining it has been having to conceal my true thoughts for as long as I have.”

Meyer is yet another example of fringe politics working its way into the Trump-era GOP, as far-right groups see the party as the best tool they have to accomplish their goals.

He explained to me in an email how he felt that his white nationalist ideas had already permeated the campaign.

“Like the hydra, you can cut off my head and hold it up for the world to see, but two more will quietly appear and be working in the shadows,” Meyer wrote. “Slating Trump to speak at [Madison Square Garden], putting ‘poisoning the blood’ in his speeches, setting up Odal runes at CPAC, etc. In a few years, one of those groypers [white supremacists] might even quietly bring me back in, with a stern warning for me to ‘be more careful next time.’”

When I wrote Pennsylvania’s Trump Force 47 team that Meyer was Barbarossa, my email tracker showed the message being opened all across Pennsylvania and New York.

I received a comment from the Republican Party of Pennsylvania. “The employee in question was background-checked and vetted, but unbeknownst to us was operating separately under a pseudonym. If we’d had any inkling about his hidden and despicable activity he would never have been hired, and the instant we learned of it he was fired. We have no place in our Party or nation for people with such shameful, hateful views.”

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In his role as regional field director, Meyer helped train volunteer “captains” for the Trump campaign. The campaign has relied heavily on volunteers for their get-out-the-vote programs, and the field directors have coordinated online and in-person trainings for people who are then expected to form their own volunteer teams. Those teams are then responsible for door-knocking and making phone calls to potential voters.

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On the podcast, Barbarossa has called Trump a “con artist,” deriding the former president’s branding deals. “He’s transformed that into a political movement so well that he can stand up and sell $60 Bibles and $400 sneakers to his crowd of adoring fans, and none of them will question it.”

So why does Barbarossa support Trump?

He has explained that it comes from a desire to cause chaos and decline, in the hopes that the pro-white movement would be able to rebuild the country — a view known as “accelerationism.” “I WILL be voting for Donald Trump, the Accelerationist candidate, in my swing state in November.” (Spencer endorsed Harris.)

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In his email to me, Meyer wrote: “I really do think Trump’s re-election will help to hasten the inevitable, but I don’t take any credit for pushing the Overton Window rightward, at least not in my capacity as a Trump staffer. The truth is that I am a comparatively small cog in the conservative machine, one of easily thousands in this country.”

“Every second man under the age of thirty in the GOP believes 90 percent of the same things I believe,” he wrote. “They just don’t have the platform that I do, and can remain undetected as I had done.”