Daniel P. Leonard, the decorated paratrooper-turned-school board member, lamented on Monday the "learning curve" of life outside the military, where politically incorrect jesting is an accepted part of the culture.

"I just retired after 23 years, and the things I could say day to day in the military to the gamut of races and nationalities — you can’t say that anymore,'' he said in an interview.

"It’s a changed world, and I’m part of the transition,'' said Leonard, a member of the Toms River Regional Board of Education. "I’m part of the old world and I’m moving into the new world."

Leonard, 42, from Beachwood, also quickly found that the new world — the New Jersey of the Donald Trump era — had little tolerance for Leonard's intolerance, a set of anti-Muslim Facebook posts that pushed the boundaries of politically acceptable speech.

And he's hardly alone. In the past few days alone, other political officials stirred to anger and defiance by Trump's toxic, race-baiting reelection strategy have discovered that New Jersey is hostile to the Trump messaging.

Bashing four congresswomen of color and recycling an old "send them back" racist trope, or trashing predominantly black Baltimore as "rat and rodent infested," might galvanize Trump's reactionary and grievance-fueled base, but in New Jersey, things don't end well for officials who parrot Trump's divisive style.

Sussex County Republican Party Chairman Jerry Scanlan grudgingly beat a retreat Monday after coming under fire for hosting a Twitter feed that became a dumping ground for racist and sexist bile. But his belated apology came after he first failed to brush past the flap with the Trumpian tactic of deflecting responsibility to someone else.

Incredibly, Scanlan initially blamed the ugly memes and retweets — which called the four congresswomen "stupid b*****s," "radical terrorists, "Whores of Babble-on" and other names — on Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat. Murphy, Scanlan argued, should bear the blame because of his efforts to enforce guidelines for when local law enforcement should cooperate with immigration and customs agents.

Palisades Park Councilman Henry Ruh resigned and moved out of town amid a scandal over the unauthorized hiring of school security officers. But Ruh had also faced fallout for forwarding racist and sexist chain letters from his personal email account to a group of acquaintances between March 2016 and April 2018.

And then there is the party-switching Michael Saudino, the former Bergen County sheriff who resigned last year after a recording surfaced with Saudino trashing Murphy and his multi-ethnic and racial Cabinet choices.

He complained that Murphy's call to legalize marijuana would "let the blacks come in, do whatever the [expletive] they want, smoke their marijuana" and said Gurbir Grewal, the nation's first Sikh state attorney general, got his job only "because of the turban."

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Saudino, who originally defected from the Republicans to the Democrats so he could keep his job as sheriff, resigned last September and has since returned to the Republican Party. Not everybody in the Bergen GOP has greeted him with open arms.

Leonard announced Monday that he would not seek another term on the school board, concerned that furor over his remarks threatened to "compromise" the board's work. The controversy erupted after the New Jersey Chapter of the Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR) sent to the media three anti-Muslim Facebook posts Leonard had made in April.

In one point, he posted a meme about “Sharia Barbie,” a brown-skinned doll in a hijab with a black eye and a purple bottom lip. “Comes with jihab [sic], bruises, & Quran,” the text read.

In one post, Leonard mocked U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat who is a Muslim, for calling a hunger strike to protest treatment of immigrants at the U.S. border. Leonard wrote that "my life would be complete if she/they die."

CAIR and other critics quickly mobilized and turned Leonard into the bête noire of anti-Muslim hatred. His defiant stand only seemed to further inflame the controversy, particularly at a confrontational school board meeting last week.

Leonard, who served in the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan. appeared to be channeling the never-back-down Trump ethos, standing unbowed before a clamor of condemnation.

In an interview, Leonard slightly walked back his remarks, stressing that he wasn't advocating for Tlaib's death or harm. He said his remark were misconstrued.

"I didn’t call for her death. My thing is if she wants to kill herself, let her kill herself. I couldn’t care less,'' he said. "She’s protesting a federal agency with a hunger strike. Meanwhile there is people are starving in this country every day, and she’s putting some kind of political stunt on."

Leonard said he had been ringing the alarm about "radical Islam" and his concerns about Sharia law before Trump came to power. He said his posts were being brought out now to discredit him as he prepared for his reelection campaign.

He said he doesn't agree with Trump on everything, but he also explained why Trump appeals to a "silent majority" of supporters.

"There are some things he says — I’ll never have that national voice, but he’ll say it and you can see that you’re not alone," Leonard said. "There is a large majority of people in the country who feel the way you feel."

That may be the sentiment shared in Trump's "base,'' but New Jersey is a different political universe. It's a state densely packed with minorities and people of different cultures working side by side in their supermarkets and research labs, or commuting on its unreliable trains.

It's an uneasy co-existence in certain places, but the diversity has bolstered the state's tradition of tolerance. It is also reflected in its politics. New Jersey has gone from a purple state to a blue one, with Democrats now enjoying a record 1 million advantage in registration over Republicans.

These are Democrats who are revolted by Trump's incendiary style, and they are now moving in greater numbers to Republican strongholds like Sussex, Somerset and even Ocean counties, where Leonard lives.

Leonard, meanwhile, takes the long view. He sees himself as a casualty of intergenerational change.

"I’m part of the old world and I’m moving into the new world, and I guess our parents and grandparents went through the same thing at some point,'' he said.

He added, "But it doesn’t mean I’m racist."