This week, Donald Trump praised his dinner guest Nick Fuentes, one of the country’s leading young right-wing extremists, according to a New York Times report on Friday.
The former president announced that he liked Fuentes after hearing him described as a member of Trump’s base, who liked it when Trump got out of control during speeches.
“He’s got me,” Trump said of Fuentes, according to the Times.
Trump’s advisers urge him to stick to written speeches; he occasionally stirred up mayhem when he was president.
Fuentes showed up Tuesday with Ye — the rapper known as Kanye West — to meet Trump at his Mar-a-Lago golf resort in Florida. Sources confirmed the meeting to publications such as Axios and Politico.
Ye’s career has gone from one crisis to another after a series of anti-Semitic tirades recently got him deactivated from Twitter and dropped from major corporate partnerships.
“De, formerly known as Kanye West, has asked me for advice on some of his struggles, particularly with his business,” Trump wrote Friday on Truth Social, the platform he founded after being banned from Twitter earlier this year. 2021.
“Anyway, we got along great, he didn’t express any anti-Semitism, and I appreciated all the nice things he said about me on ‘Tucker Carlson.’ [Tonight].’ Why should I not agree to meet? Trump wrote, referring to the Fox News program.
He added, “I didn’t even know Nick Fuentes.”
Fuentes, a white supremacist, has sparked outrage after appearing alongside other prominent Republicans in the past, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, both of whom have since tried to distance themselves from Fuentes.
Trump also told Truth Social that he discouraged Ye from announcing a 2024 presidential run while the two were dating. Trump’s 2024 campaign is less than two weeks old.
Ye, meanwhile, announced his candidacy on Twitter on Thursday with a video in which he partially described the dinner, claiming that Trump had said something derogatory about Kim Kardashian, Ye’s ex-wife.
The rapper’s Twitter account was reinstated earlier this month under new CEO Elon Musk. It was also on the platform that Ye Post a screenshot of a text thread purporting to be between him, right-wing agitator Milo Yiannopoulos, Fuentes and another individual whose name has been withheld.
Fuentes came to public attention during the Trump years as the founder of an extremist youth group called America First, which espouses hateful views, particularly hostile to black people, women and the Jewish people. He stated on various occasions that segregation was better for black Americans and downplayed the Holocaust questionnaires how many people have been killed, comparing them to cakes baked in the oven.
Fuentes also attended the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Shortly after the event, which resulted in the death of a woman, Fuentes praised it as “unbelievable”, writing on Facebook that the “rootless transnational elite know that a great wave of white identity is coming”.
Dozens of Republicans chastised Trump for hosting Fuentes after news of the dinner leaked. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie even questioned Trump’s suggestion that he was unaware of Fuentes’ background.
“He can’t stand not having attention all the time,” Christie told The New York Times of Trump. “And so for someone to show up at his club — even if you don’t think he knew who Nick Fuentes was — and want to meet him, it feeds his hunger for attention that he’s been missing since he left the presidency. “
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