Former Florida Tea Party congressman turned right-wing pundit Allen West returned to Trump Tower for his second visit with the president-elect and his transition team in one week, even as he failed to publicly apologize for sharing a meme with his 2.5 million Facebook followers that praised Donald Trump’s pick to run the Pentagon for his plan to “exterminate” Muslims.
When West, rumored to be in talks to join Trump’s national security team, arrived for his second meeting with the president-elect on Monday, he was remarkably not asked by any member of the gathered press about the meme he shared praising Trump’s pick to be defense secretary, retired Marine Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis.
Mattis, an Obama appointee, stepped down from his United States Central Command in 2013, just months after recommending to the president that at least 13,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan past the scheduled end of the combat mission in 2014.
Shortly after midnight Friday, West praised Mattis with a meme posted to his official Facebook post. The meme showed Mattis with the words “Fired by Obama to please the Muslims. Hired by Trump to exterminate them”:
By Saturday afternoon the meme was taken down and an apology was issued on Facebook by Michele Hickford, the editor-in-chief of West’s website.
“I take full responsibility for this,” Hickford wrote, claiming West had no knowledge of the post and did not consent to its posting:
Hickford did not explain why she shared the meme to West’s Facebook page. According to the New York Daily News, the post spent hours accumulating dozens of shares, likes and comments before it was removed.
A representative from the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said that an apology should be issued by the former Florida congressman who lost his re-election bid in 2012.
Hassan Shibly, the chief executive officer of CAIR-Florida, said in a statement that the post “clearly disqualifies Allen West from any future public appointments of nominations”:
