Trump’s Campaign Does Damage Control After He Dines With a White Supremacist and Kanye West
© AP Photo / Seth Wenig
Subscribe
The former president said he “knew nothing about” West’s friends whom the rapper had brought to dinner, including the white supremacist Nick Fuentes. In a video which he released to Twitter, West has told his own version of the dinner, saying: “Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes”.
The campaign team working for Donald Trump is doing damage control this week after the former president had hosted an accidental dinner with denounced rapper Kanye West, white supremacist Nick Fuentes, and two others including Karen Giorno, who was the director of Trump’s 2016 campaign in Florida.
“This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about,” Trump said in a statement via his Truth Social platform on Friday. “We had dinner on Tuesday evening with many members present on the back patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful. They then left for the airport.”
Trump failed to acknowledge that he did, in fact, know Giorno whom three sources told an American news outlet Trump would have recognized in person.
Fuentes, 24, who is helping to advise West in his second presidential campaign---yes, he’s also running---is an outspoken antisemite, Holocaust denier, and unabashed racist who uses hate speech in his podcast, and has publicly demanded that Jews leave the country and Black neighborhoods be placed under martial law, an American news outlet reported.
"This is a f****** nightmare," said one longtime Trump adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of angering the former president. "If people are looking at [Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis to run against Trump, here's another reason why."
Trump is undoubtedly attempting to distance himself from the company he shared dinner with as the former president, who is running for his second term in office, is already a deeply controversial figure. He recently had his Twitter account reinstated by owner Elon Musk who bought the social media service for $44 billion last month, after Trump had his Twitter account suspended following the January 6 riots at the US Capitol in 2021. His account posed a risk of inciting violence, the company said at the time.
According to a source, which was corroborated by West himself, the dinner grew heated after West asked Trump if he would be his running mate.
"I think the thing that Trump was most perturbed about, me asking him to be my vice president. I think that was like lower on the list of things that caught him off guard. It was the fact that I walked in with intelligence,” West revealed in a nearly two-minute clip on his Twitter account (which was also recently reinstated after being shut down for antisemitic comments).
“So Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes, and Nick Fuentes, unlike so many of the lawyers of so many people that he was left with on his 2020 campaign, he's actually a loyalis,” said West. “And when all the lawyers said, 'forget it, Trump's done,' there are loyalists running up in the White House, right? And my question would be, why, when you had the chance, did you not free the January Sixers?”
Kanye showing love to the J6 prisoners... https://t.co/cFAY97N0B9
— Darren J. Beattie 🌐 (@DarrenJBeattie) November 25, 2022
Trump and West are both deeply controversial Republican presidential candidates. Trump is the first president in US history to be impeached twice, he has been subpoenaed to give a testimony under oath for his involvement in the January 6 riots on Capitol Hill in 2021, and his Mar-a-Lago residence was raided this year by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after he wrongfully took and concealed classified documents as some sort of ‘ego play’.
West, who is a rapper, fashion designer, and mogul, has been sparking controversies for years, but more recently showcased a “White Lives Matter” t-shirt which he designed for Paris Fashion Week this year, and after backlash doubled down on the statement. Following that scandal and after a series of bombshell interviews the rapper wrote a Tweet attacking the Jewish community. His comments then cost him his billionaire status after major fashion brands like Adidas, Gap Inc., Balenciaga, Vogue, and others decided to drop him.
