Trump's Black outreach chief warns 'racism and hatred' in leaked GOP texts will doom party

The ongoing fallout over leaked racist text messages from Republican leaders and staffers is now causing one prominent Black organizer from President Donald Trump's reelection campaign to issue a stark warning to her party.

The text messages, which were initially leaked to Politico this week, showed Republican elected officials and party officials in multiple states openly praising Germany's fascist regime during World War II, sending political opponents "to the gas chamber" and calling Black people "monkeys" and "watermelon people." Several of the Republican officials named in the report have either resigned or been fired from their positions.

In a Thursday op-ed for the Washington Post, Gina Barr — who was the executive director of Black coalitions for the Trump 2024 campaign — lamented that young Republicans who have been tasked with leading the GOP in the coming decades openly espoused "hatred and racism."

"Their bigotry doesn’t just stain their reputations — it blinds them and their ilk to the reality of the political terrain ahead," Barr wrote.

Barr, who is also the director of women and urban engagement at the Republican National Committee according to her LinkedIn profile, said that the scandal was particularly damning for Republicans given that the most important "terrain" in the 2026 midterm elections is in the suburbs, and that people of color will play an outsized role in determining who controls Congress next November.

"The demographics tell the story. Of the 26 congressional districts targeted by the National Republican Congressional Committee, 17 are in areas where at least 40 percent of residents are people of color, according to the 2020 census," she wrote. "Four of Texas’s five newly drawn seats are majority minority. Those numbers aren’t just statistics — they are the future knocking on the GOP’s door."

Barr acknowledged that while Republicans made inroads with communities of color in 2024, those gains could be wiped out if voters see the GOP as a party filled with closet racists. She called on the GOP to "root out anyone in its ranks still clinging to the racist relics of the past."

"The Republican Party made real progress with voters of color in 2024. If it hopes to keep Congress in 2026, it will need to work even harder," she wrote. "Because the terrain has shifted — and in politics, like war, if you don’t understand the terrain, you lose."

Click here to read Barr's full op-ed in the Post.