Donald Trump repeatedly bragged he would only bring the best people to his administration. “I hire the top, top people” and his administration would be filled "with only the best and most serious people." And yet, time and time again, his hires and appointees have been incompetent, unserious and in many cases, outright racist.
Such is the case with Carl Higbie, the former Navy SEAL who Trump appointed as the Chief of External Affairs at the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), which oversees the volunteer services of AmeriCorp and Senior Corps. Before coming to the Trump administration, Higbie appeared on the “Sound of Freedom” radio show, where he regularly espoused deeply hateful, racist, sexist commentary. CNN obtained the records and strong warning here, this is really vile stuff. Here he is describing a time he gave away free firewood. He said 50 people turned out for the free firewood, half of them black, half of them white and…...:
"Only one person was actually cordial to me," Higbie said. "Every other black person was rude. They wanted me to either load the wood, completely split it for them or some sort of you know assistance in labor. Now, mind you the ad was for free firewood, come take it all you want. And I believe that this translates directly into the culture that is breeding this welfare and the high percentage of people on welfare in the black race. It's a lax of morality."
He added later, "We're promoting birth control to a black woman because of the incredibly high rate of children born out of wedlock that are under-cared for or not cared for at all. The taxpayers are tired of supporting government checks going to these people who think that breeding is a form of employment. I'm sorry if black people are the majority of the targeted audience. They are, statistically they are."
And how does the former Navy SEAL feel about Muslims?
"Go back to your Muslim shithole and go crap in your hands and bang little boys on Thursday nights," Higbie said. "I just don't like Muslim people. People always rip me a new one for that. Carl, you're racist, you can't, you're sexist. I'm like Jesus Christ. I just don't like Muslim people because their ideology sucks."
How does Higbie feel about people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally? He thinks citizens should be able to just show up and murder people.
"What's so wrong with wanting to put up a fence and saying, 'hey, everybody with a gun, if you want to go shoot people coming across our border illegally, you can do it fo' free,'" Higbie said. "And you can do it on your own, and you'll be under the command of the, you know, National Guard unit or a Border Patrol, I think stick a fence six feet high with signs on it in both English and Spanish and it says 'if you cross this border, this is the American border, you cross it, we're going to shoot you.'"
He also believes that if you’ve taken government assistance, like many military families are forced to do, that you shouldn’t be allowed to vote:
"If you have taken any benefit, if you have elected to take any benefit from the government at any given time during any election cycle, you do not get to vote at the subsequent election," he said. "Because now you have people voting for a living. They don't have to work, and if you want to solve them now -- it's very hard to get something like this past, I'll be honest -- but if you pass something like that, what you would see is, you would see people who aren't contributing to the system, not voting for the system and you'll have a massive slide to the right in this country."
Needless to say, Higbie was forced to immediately resign after CNN published the audio recordings. You can hear those below, but CNN has a more thorough synopsis here. For his part, Higbie is suddenly very sorry about his vile commentary.
Sorry, Carl — they actually do reflect who you are and what you stand for. An apology tweet isn’t going to change that for you. As you can hear, he sounded resolute about his feelings only 5 years ago.
Carl Higbie also managed to repeatedly get booked on Fox News and CNN as a Trump supporter. Weird how all these white supremacists seem to be so drawn to Donald Trump. Here is Trump supporting Higbie on CNN defending Donald Trump’s racism in 2016.