Carl Paladino, who co-chaired Donald Trump’s campaign in New York, speaks to the media at Trump Tower on Dec. 5. | AFP/Getty Trump ally posts defiant apology for Obama family comments

A New York school board member allied with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign apologized Tuesday to the “minority community” following outrage over “emotional” comments he made about the first family.

“I never intended to hurt the minority community who I spent years trying to help out of the cycle of poverty in our inner cities,” Carl Paladino, who co-chaired Trump’s campaign in New York and sits on the Buffalo school board, wrote in a 746-word statement posted Tuesday on Facebook. “I apologize.”


In response to a question last week from the Buffalo publication Artvoice about his hopes for 2017, Paladino said he would most like to see President Barack Obama catch “mad cow disease after being caught having relations with a Herford.” He likely meant Hereford, a type of cattle.

Paladino continued: “He dies before his trial and is buried in a cow pasture next to” senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, “who died weeks prior, after being convicted of sedition and treason, when a Jihady cell mate mistook her for being a nice person and decapitated her.”

Paladino said he would most like to see first lady Michelle Obama go away in 2017. “I’d like her to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla,” he said.

Trump’s transition team had called Paladino’s remarks “absolutely reprehensible,” and many people called for his resignation from the school board.

But Paladino said he is not a racist and won’t resign his school board post. His emailed response to Artvoice was a mishap, he said.

“I publicly took responsibility for what I said and confirmed those were my answers, but believe it or not, I did not mean to send those answers to Artvoice,” he said. “Not that it makes any difference because what I wrote was inappropriate under any circumstance. I filled out the survey to send to a couple friends and forwarded it to them not realizing that I didn't hit ‘forward’ I hit ‘reply.’ All men make mistakes.”

In a previous statement he posted to Facebook on Christmas Eve, Paladino said his comments had “nothing to do with race.” He called President Obama “a lazy ass president,” accused the first lady of hating America and cast Jarrett as a non-American.

“Merry Christmas and tough luck if you don’t like my answer,” he wrote in the Christmas Eve post.

On Tuesday, though, he maintained that he received the four-question survey “at an emotional moment” — shortly after Obama made comments on the chaos within Aleppo in Syria.

“Those survey questions provided me with the spark to vent and write deprecating humor about a bad President for whom the main stream media continues to seek an undeserved legacy,” he wrote. “I wanted to say something as sarcastic and hurtful as possible about the people who are totally responsible for the hurt and suffering of so many others. I was wired up, primed to be human and I made a mistake. I could not have made a worse choice in the words I used to express my feelings.”

Paladino lamented having to explain to his teenage daughter “how her hero could be so stupid” and watching his family and friends “react to the rabid hordes of attacking parasites we now call activist progressives.”

In his lengthy statement, Paladino repeatedly lashed out at a range of adversaries — school board members, teachers, administrators, superintendents, the Obamas, progressives, the media.

He said he thinks about minorities daily as he fights against “unqualified and incompetent” education officials and “broken homes and children who can’t get the education they need to break that cycle of poverty because our school system is a failure, for reasons that needn’t be.”

“I've spent years dedicated to the mission to defeat the thought that the liberal progressive elitist establishment can continue to hold our minority children captive in the cycle of poverty simply to provide their voting base. I don't intend to yield to the fanatics among my adversaries,” he wrote.

Paladino told the “vanquished progressive haters out there spewing their venom at anything that is a reminder of their humiliating defeat” that “irrelevance is tough to chew on” and encouraged the “mean-spirited, disoriented press trying to find grounding and recover legitimacy on my back” to pray they still have jobs in 2017 “because you have lost all credibility with the people.”

“It's been a sick, combative year for America,” he wrote. “We changed the direction of our country and beat back the demons for a few decades. I am proud to have been a part of the making of history.”