A Key Trump Staffer Was Fired For Being a White Nationalist

A white nationalist worked for the Trump campaign in an important position in Pennsylvania for five months — until Friday, when the campaign fired him after learning about his views from my reporting.

Last week, I confirmed that Luke Meyer, the Trump campaign’s 24-year-old regional field director for Western Pennsylvania, goes by the online name Alberto Barbarossa. As Barbarossa, he co-hosts the Alexandria podcast with Richard Spencer, organizer of the 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. On his podcast and others, and in posts online, Barbarossa regularly shares white nationalist views.

“Why can’t we make New York, for example, white again? Why can’t we clear out and reclaim Miami?” Barbarossa asked while guest hosting a different white nationalist podcast in June. “I’m not saying we need to be 100 percent homogeneous. I’m not saying we need to be North Korea or Japan or anything like that. A return to 80 percent, 90 percent white would probably be, probably the best we could hope for, to some degree.”

After I presented Meyer with evidence that he was Barbarossa, he admitted the connection and said he has been hiding his online identity from his colleagues on Trump Force 47, the arm of the Trump campaign that runs volunteer organizers. “I am glad you pieced these little clues together like an antifa Nancy Drew,” he wrote in an email. “It made me realize how draining it has been having to conceal my true thoughts for as long as I have.”

Meyer is yet another example of fringe politics working its way into the Trump-era GOP, as far-right groups see the party as the best tool they have to accomplish their goals.

When I wrote Pennsylvania’s Trump Force 47 team that Meyer was Barbarossa, my email tracker showed the message being opened all across Pennsylvania and New York.

I received a comment from the Republican Party of Pennsylvania. “The employee in question was background-checked and vetted, but unbeknownst to us was operating separately under a pseudonym. If we’d had any inkling about his hidden and despicable activity he would never have been hired, and the instant we learned of it he was fired. We have no place in our Party or nation for people with such shameful, hateful views.”

Trump Force 47 is funded by each state’s GOP, but it is working directly with the Trump campaign as the program responsible for generating volunteers. Team Trump calls it a “joint effort” between the RNC and the campaign itself. Typically, requests for comment about Trump Force 47 are answered by Trump campaign officials. In this case, the campaign declined to comment directly, directing me to the Republican Party of Pennsylvania.

In his role as regional field director, Meyer helped train volunteer “captains” for the Trump campaign. The campaign has relied heavily on volunteers for their get-out-the-vote programs, and the field directors have coordinated online and in-person trainings for people who are then expected to form their own volunteer teams. Those teams are then responsible for door-knocking and making phone calls to potential voters.

Meyer isn’t employed with the campaign anymore. But he explained to me in an email how he felt that his white nationalist ideas had already permeated it.

“Like the hydra, you can cut off my head and hold it up for the world to see, but two more will quietly appear and be working in the shadows,” Meyer wrote. “Slating Trump to speak at [Madison Square Garden], putting ‘poisoning the blood’ in his speeches, setting up Odal runes at CPAC, etc. In a few years, one of those groypers [white supremacists] might even quietly bring me back in, with a stern warning for me to ‘be more careful next time.’”

Hours after the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Barbarossa posted a photo of a Trump staff badge from the rally on X. “What else can I say but that I lived through history?” he wrote.

A week later, I received an anonymous tip that Barbarossa was Luke Meyer. Like most reporters, I get plenty of anonymous tips, many of which lead nowhere. But unlike most journalists, I spent a year undercover in the far-right and I write about far-right extremism. As a result, I am often sent information from a variety of conservatives, everyone from Never Trumpers and mainstream Republicans who want to keep extremists out of the party, to neo-Nazis with a personal ax to grind.

I found clues online that seemed to verify this tip: Barbarossa proudly tweeted that he shared a July 1 birthday with former grand wizard of the KKK David Duke, and court records showed that Meyer also did. According to his girlfriend’s mother’s Instagram photos, Meyer was in Clarksburg, West Virginia, the same day that Barbarossa posted on X that he was in Clarksburg. The nail in the coffin, for me, was when Barbarossa posted a photo of a television with a window reflected in the screen. Having spent too much time scouring photos of the Beaver County Trump Force 47 office, I immediately recognized the television, the color of the wall, and the windows in the television’s reflection as the main room of the office. Any doubt I had previously was gone.

So, with less than two weeks until the election, I rented a car and drove from Washington, to Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, for a Trump Force 47 event that Meyer had shared on social media.

I was sure Meyer would recognize me. Barbarossa and I follow each other on X and occasionally engage with one another, and I have heard my name come up on Alexandria more than once. I waited until the end to confront him.

“I think we follow each other on Twitter,” I said. “Do you go by Alberto?”

“No, I usually go by Luke Meyer.”

He then asked me how I would know him as Alberto. “Oh, just a podcast I listen to.”

“Do I just have that distinctive of a voice, I suppose?” he asked me, after a bit of back and forth, seemingly admitting the connection.

Later, when presented with all my evidence, Meyer himself confirmed his online identity.

I expected the revelation, but it was still shocking.

Association with Spencer is enough to end a career in Republican politics. Spencer rose to national infamy during the first Trump campaign. Six weeks before the 2016 election, Spencer gave a Nazi salute and shouted, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” in a room full of white supremacists — and reporters. Less than a year later, Spencer led the tiki torch march in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was a scheduled speaker for the subsequent Unite the Right rally where a white supremacist drove a car into a crowd, killing a woman. Spencer has disavowed her death and those involved, but he still has racially charged views and associates himself with white nationalists.

Here was a member of the Trump campaign — Meyer/Barbarossa — on the Alexandria podcast with Spencer, making white nationalist statements. His X account, which has around 1,500 followers, was also full of racist tweets. (When reached for comment, Spencer said that Meyer in his capacity as a Trump staffer was “not operating on my behalf.”)

On one episode of Alexandria, which is behind a paywall, a guest host brought up Vivek Ramaswamy and Usha Vance, JD Vance’s wife, who are both of Indian descent. “Indians are just sort of taking over. … It’s like, with Jews, right? They’re just going to be everywhere. And, like, it’s just going to be something we have to sort of deal with on the margins.”

“The country is not going to return to Ben Franklin’s heady, glorious ideals of a pure, Hyperborean ethnostate,” Barbarossa replied. “But what you can preserve is something where we have complete and total control, something not unlike Rhodesia or South Africa.”

“Not every Black is Ben Carson, but even the ones who are Ben Carson, you know, who is to say that their kid doesn’t turn out to be 50 Cent?” he said on a different episode.

In his email to me, Meyer wrote: “My commentary, as you’ve quoted, can sometimes verge on the outlandish side, but you have to engage in some degree of hyperbole to make an entertaining podcast and cut through all the noise on X.” Since Friday, Meyer has deleted his LinkedIn and X accounts, as well as the Barbarossa X account.

Barbarossa has also stressed that he disagrees with many of Trump’s policies, believing the former president “panders” too much to Jewish and Black voters. “Trump will stop pandering to Blacks when the sun rises in the West and sets in the East. When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves,” Barbarossa tweeted when Trump met with rapper Lil Pump.

On the anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, when Trump said that he would condemn “Jew haters” who are opposed to Israel, Barbarossa tweeted, “Trump out here badly underestimating just how much of his own campaign staff are ‘Jew-haters.’”

Barbarossa has posted photos of his hand wearing a ring with a sonnenrad, or Black Sun, on it. The sonnenrad symbol was used by the Nazis, and continues to be used by neo-Nazis. (Last year, the Ron DeSantis campaign fired a staffer for creating a video featuring this same imagery.) On X, Barbarossa wrote that he doesn’t“tend to wear it often, of course. … Mostly just when I know I’m among friends.”

“As for the ring…you’ve got me dead to rights,” he wrote in his email to me. “I am a REALLY big fan of German Renaissance castles.”

On the podcast, Barbarossa has called Trump a “con artist,” deriding the former president’s branding deals. “He’s transformed that into a political movement so well that he can stand up and sell $60 Bibles and $400 sneakers to his crowd of adoring fans, and none of them will question it.”

So why does Barbarossa support Trump?

He has explained that it comes from a desire to cause chaos and decline, in the hopes that the pro-white movement would be able to rebuild the country — a view known as “accelerationism.” “I WILL be voting for Donald Trump, the Accelerationist candidate, in my swing state in November.” (Spencer endorsed Harris.)

People who embrace an accelerationist view believe the country is more chaotic when Trump is in power. In this view, that chaos or unrest comes from Republicans — things like Jan. 6. and Charlottesville — and from Democrats — for example, large scale racial justice protests and riots following George Floyd’s death. White nationalists hope that unrest will scare Americans into being more anxious, fearful of diversity, nativist and racist.

In his email to me, Meyer wrote: “I really do think Trump’s re-election will help to hasten the inevitable, but I don’t take any credit for pushing the Overton Window rightward, at least not in my capacity as a Trump staffer. The truth is that I am a comparatively small cog in the conservative machine, one of easily thousands in this country.”

“Every second man under the age of thirty in the GOP believes 90 percent of the same things I believe,” he wrote. “They just don’t have the platform that I do, and can remain undetected as I had done.”

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