Republican Senate candidate's spokesperson called US cities 's---holes'
Rick Shaftan's comments followed in the wake of President Trump's.
The spokesman for a Republican U.S. Senate candidate has come under scrutiny for some tweets in which he called several U.S. cities "s---holes."
Political consultant Rick Shaftan's online history has emerged in the wake of his appointment as a spokesperson for Corey Stewart, a Republican from Virginia who running for the Senate.
The inflammatory tweets surfaced in a story published by The Daily Beast earlier this week. In response to the story, Shaftan appeared to confirm their substance in a Facebook post, writing, "I must have said something worse than that in all these years! They need to look harder."
Shaftan's multiple tweets came after President Donald Trump faced a backlash for reportedly describing Haiti and African nations as "s---hole countries" during a discussion in the Oval Office.
Nearly two weeks after those comments, Shaftan tweeted about Baltimore, Maryland, writing "The word #s---hole is an appropriate one to describe this particular s---hole."
The tweet included a link to a news article about how the city was going to turn a perch that had displayed a recently removed Confederate monument into one that will showcase a statue of abolitionist Harriet Tubman.
In a March tweet, Shaftan shared a link to a story about Memphis dumping wastewater into the Mississippi River, writing "Another urban s---hole. #BigBlueCities."
In May, Shaftan responded to a Twitter user who suggested a boycott of New Orleans, Shaftan wrote that he supported the idea, adding "you can run your gang-infested s---hole without our tourist dollars and soon, our tax dollars."
And two days later, he shared an op-ed piece in which an alleged former Peace Corps volunteer reiterated Trump's description of African nations. On that tweet, Shaftan urged his more than 7,000 followers to "read this about the world's #S---holes."
Some of the tweets remain on Shaftan’s Twitter feed and some have been deleted.
In response to ABC News inquiries, Stewart's campaign issued a statement that appeared to focus on the Daily Beast's headline -- which characterized the cities in question as "majority-black": "GOP Candidate Corey Stewart’s Spokesperson Called Majority-Black Cities ‘Shitholes'".
In the statement, a Stewart spokesperson, Noel Fritsch, wrote that "Far Left liberals and weak Republicans play the race card to shut down all debate, and meanwhile we can't even have a conversation about how to improve the economy for blacks who -- as a direct result of decades of failed federal government programs -- haven't seen economic growth in the last 50 years."
Nothing in the statement sought to refute Shaftan's characterizations of the cities as "s---holes."
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