Donald Trump this week praised his dinner visitor Nick Fuentes, probably the most distinguished younger right-wing extremists within the nation, in accordance with a report Friday in The New York Times.
The former president reportedly introduced that he preferred Fuentes after listening to him describe himself as a member of Trump’s base who preferred when Trump went off the cuff throughout speeches. (A supply told Axios that Trump mentioned he “really” preferred Fuentes.)
“He gets me,” Trump mentioned of Fuentes, the Times and Axios each reported.
Trump’s advisers reportedly urge him to stick to the speeches as written; he often sparked chaos when ad-libbing throughout his time as president.
Axios’ unnamed supply commented that he didn’t imagine “the president knew who the hell [Fuentes] was.” Trump made an analogous assertion after information of the assembly was made public.
Fuentes had confirmed up alongside Ye — the rapper previously generally known as Kanye West — to satisfy Trump at his Mar-a-Lago golf resort in Florida on Tuesday. Sources confirmed the assembly to retailers like Axios and Politico.
Ye’s profession has bounced from disaster to disaster after a sequence of antisemitic tirades just lately obtained him kicked off Twitter and dropped from main company partnerships.
“Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was asking me for advice concerning some of his difficulties, in particular having to do with his business,” Trump wrote Friday on Truth Social, the platform he based after getting banned from Twitter in early 2021.
“Anyway, we got along great, he expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on ‘Tucker Carlson [Tonight].’ Why wouldn’t I agree to meet?” Trump wrote, referring to the Fox News program.
He added, “Also, I didn’t know Nick Fuentes.”
Fuentes, a white supremacist, has prompted outrage after cropping up alongside different distinguished Republicans previously, together with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia and Rep. Paul Gosar from Arizona ― both of whom later sought to distance themselves from Fuentes.
Trump additionally mentioned on Truth Social that he discouraged Ye from asserting a 2024 presidential run whereas the 2 met. Trump’s personal 2024 marketing campaign is lower than two weeks outdated.
Ye, nevertheless, announced his candidacy Thursday on Twitter with a video through which he partially described the dinner, stating that Trump had mentioned one thing derogatory about Kim Kardashian, Ye’s ex-wife.
The rapper’s Twitter account had been reinstated earlier this month underneath the management of recent CEO Elon Musk. It was additionally on the platform that Ye posted a screenshot of a textual content thread purportedly between himself, right-wing agitator Milo Yiannopoulos, Fuentes and one other particular person whose title was blurred out.
Fuentes attracted public consideration throughout the Trump years because the founding father of an extremist youth group known as America First who espouses hateful views which might be particularly hostile to folks of colour, ladies and Jewish folks. He has at varied occasions acknowledged that segregation was higher for Black Americans and minimized the Holocaust by questioning how many individuals have been killed, evaluating them to cookies baking in an oven.
Fuentes additionally participated within the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Directly after the occasion, which left one girl useless, Fuentes praised it as “incredible,” writing on Facebook that the “rootless transnational elite knows that a tidal wave of white identity is coming.”
Scores of Republicans chastised Trump for internet hosting Fuentes after information of the dinner leaked. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie even solid doubt on Trump’s suggestion that he wasn’t conscious of Fuentes’ background.
“He can’t stand not having attention all the time,” Christie told The New York Times, talking about Trump. “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.”
