Arkansas Online

Trump has dinner with far-right activist

MAGGIE HABERMAN AND ALAN FEUER

Former President Donald Trump had dinner Tuesday with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken white supremacist, at Trump’s private club in Florida, advisers to Trump conceded Friday.

Also at the dinner was performer Ye, who has changed his name from Kanye West and recently been condemned for making antisemitic statements. Ye traveled to meet with Trump at the club, Mara-Lago, and brought Fuentes along, the advisers said.

The fourth attendee at the four-person dinner, Karen Giorno — a veteran political operative who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign as his state director in Florida — also confirmed that Fuentes was there. Attempts to reach Fuentes through an intermediary Friday were unsuccessful.

In recent years, Fuentes, 24, has developed a high profile on the far right and forged ties with such Republican lawmakers as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, largely through his leadership of an annual white supremacist event called the America First Political Action Conference.

A Holocaust denier, Fuentes in recent weeks on his podcast has called for the military to be sent into Black neighborhoods and demanded that Jews leave the country.

It is unclear how much Trump knew of Fuentes’ well-documented extremism before their dinner.

In a statement, Trump said: “Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago. Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about.”

The statement said nothing about Fuentes’ views. In a post later Friday on his Truth Social platform, Trump said Ye “unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about.” He said the dinner took place “with many members present on the back patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful. Then they left for the airport.”

“This is just another example of an awful lack of judgment from Donald Trump, which, combined with his past poor judgments, make him an untenable general election candidate for the Republican Party in 2024,” said Chris Christie, former Republican governor of New Jersey and presidential candidate.

In a statement that did not name Trump but was issued in response to the Fuentes dinner, Matt Brooks, CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition said, “We strongly condemn the virulent antisemitism of Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, and call on all political leaders to reject their messages of hate and refuse to meet with them.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, condemned Trump’s meeting with Fuentes.

“Nick Fuentes is among the most prominent and unapologetic antisemites in the country,” Greenblatt said in a brief interview. “He’s a vicious bigot and known Holocaust denier who has been condemned by leading figures from both political parties here, including the RJC.”

Greenblatt added that the idea that Trump “or any serious contender for higher office would meet with him and validate him by sharing a meal and spending time is appalling. And really, you can’t say that you oppose hate and break bread with haters. It’s that simple.”

Fuentes, who attended the bloody far-right rally in 2017 in Charlottesville, Va., is best known for running a white nationalist youth organization known as America First — whose adherents call themselves groypers or the Groyper Army. In the wake of Trump’s defeat in 2020, Fuentes and the groypers were involved in a series of public events supporting the former president.

At a so-called Stop the Steal rally in Washington in November 2020, Fuentes urged his followers to “storm every state capitol until Jan. 20, 2021, until President Trump is inaugurated for four more years.” The following month, at a similar event, Fuentes led a crowd in chanting “Destroy the GOP,” and urged people not to vote in the January 2021 Georgia Senate runoff elections.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Fuentes led a large group of groypers to the Capitol, where they rallied outside in support of Trump. The next day, Fuentes wrote on Twitter that the assault on the Capitol was “awesome and I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t.”

At least seven people with connections to his America First organization have been charged with federal crimes in connection with the Capitol attack. In January, Fuentes was issued a subpoena by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol seeking information about his role in it.

Christie speculated that hosting Ye and Fuentes served a desire particular to Trump: “He can’t stand not having attention all the time,” Christie said. “And so, having someone show up at his club — even if you believe that he didn’t know who Nick Fuentes was — and want to sit with him, feeds the hunger he feels for the attention he’s missing since he left the presidency.”

Ye, who ran for president in 2020 and has said he will run again in 2024, posted on Twitter a video in which he described the dinner. He claimed that Trump was “really impressed” with Fuentes.

Ye also said he asked Trump to serve as his running mate and claimed that Trump spoke derogatorily about Ye’s ex-wife, Kim Kardashian.

Citing people close to Trump, some earlier news coverage of Ye’s visit to Mara-Lago falsely reported that Fuentes did not attend the dinner.

“We strongly condemn the virulent antisemitism of Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, and call on all political leaders to reject their messages of hate and refuse to meet with them.”

— Matt Brooks, CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition

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2022-11-26T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-11-26T08:00:00.0000000Z

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