Kathy Zhu’s days of unemployment are over. After being stripped of her Miss World America title over racist tweets, she’s joined Donald Trump‘s 2020 re-election campaign.
Zhu announced the news on Twitter on Thursday, July 27, revealing that she joined the Women For Trump Coalition’s advisory board. Her tweet was published after Team Trump, the official campaign Twitter for Trump’s campaign, welcomed her to its re-election effort the same day.
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I am so excited to now be part of the #WomenforTrump Coalition Advisory Board!
Letโs get Trump re-elected for 2020 ๐บ๐ธ๐ https://t.co/uhdBfdInlh
โ Kathy Zhu (@PoliticalKathy) July 26, 2019
Team Trump hailed Zhu as “a patriot” who represents “American values despite being stripped of her crown.” The campaign also thanked her for her continued support.
After announcing her new gig, Zhu appeared at a Women for Trump luncheon in Michigan, the Detroit Free Press noted. During the event, she likened being conservative to being gay, alleging that the former was more difficult to reveal these days.
“It seems harder to come out as conservative than it does as being gay,” she said, according to the newspaper.
Zhu, 20, continued, “People wanted to ridicule me.”
“There were so many times that my account got hacked from the left,” she claimed.
The political commentator was hurled into the spotlight on July 18, when she revealed on social media that she received an email from Miss World America pageant organizers letting her know that she’d been removed from the competition. Her removal from the pageant was a direct result of some of her tweets, which Miss World America organizers deemed “offensive, insensitive and inappropriate.”
Zhu’s offensive tweets were about crime in the black community and hijab. The hijab tweet was posted to her account in 2018, according to Detroit Free Press. It referred to the University of Central Florida’s “World Hijab Day” celebration, during which Zhu declined to participate in a hijab try on. In response to the event, she tweeted an offensive question about whether hijab was for fashion or religious purposes.
“So you’re telling me that it’s now just a fashion accessory and not a religious thing? Or are you just trying to get women used to being oppressed under Islam?” she wrote on Twitter.
Another tweet from Zhu, drafted around the same time, read, “Did you know the majority of black deaths are caused by blacks? Fix problems within your own community before blaming others.”
Both tweets have been deleted.
She included the email in her tweet for followers to read. It stated that her “social media accounts contain offensive, insensitive and inappropriate content” and was”in violation of MWA’s Rules and Conditions, specifically the contest requirement of ‘being of good character and whose background is not likely to bring into disrepute Miss World America.’”
The email ordered Zhu to remove all mention of and photos of herself representing Miss World America from social media.
Miss World America’s State/National/Chief Director accused me of being racist, Islamaphobic, and insensitive.
They stripped me of my Miss Michigan title due to my refusal to try on a hijab in 2018, my tweet about black on black gun violence, and “insensitive” statistical tweets. pic.twitter.com/K1Btho0Pgq
โ Kathy Zhu (@PoliticalKathy) July 19, 2019
She claimed Miss World America failed to provide her with a clear definition of what “insensitive” means. Zhu also disagreed that any of her posts were insensitive.
Speaking with the Detroit Free Press at the time, Zhu said this types of punishment is not uncommon in the pageant world, especially for conservatives. The former Miss Michigan is an outspoken Trump supporter, and makes her right-wing views known.
“I have seen this happen before,” she told the paper. “It is just not OK to be prejudiced against people who just have a different political view as you.”
She told Yahoo! Lifestlye Miss World America is “not letting people that represent another side of the story represent them.”