The Slatest

Buffalo School Board Takes Steps to Oust Trump Ally Board Member After Racist Remarks About the Obamas

Carl Paladino speaks to the media before meetings with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower on Dec. 5 in New York.

Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images

The Buffalo, New York, board of education passed a resolution Thursday ordering Carl Paladino, co-chairman of Donald Trump’s campaign in New York, to resign from his post on the school board following racist comments about the Obama family. In a special meeting, board members voted 6–2 that Paladino must resign within 24 hours, which would be by Friday afternoon. Paladino has so far refused to step down despite the uproar over his comments in a local weekly where he said, among other things, he wished Michelle Obama would “return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.”

If Paladino, who has been on the Buffalo school board since 2013 and was re-elected this year, refuses to resign, the board will then petition the state education commissioner to remove him from office. Paladino has been generally unrepentant for his broadly offensive remarks about the Obamas, instead offering a half-baked nonapology that he had meant to hit “forward” and send his racist remarks to only a few people, not “reply” and send them to, well, the publication itself.