Trump's Latest Dinner Guest: Nick Fuentes, White Supremacist - The New York Times

This is reminiscent of the time when Trump couldnt remember who David Duke was. 

A meeting between a half crazed anti-semitic rapper, a demented white supremacist, and an ex-president of the United States. What a country. 

Now Trump can both dog whistle the white supremacists that he "gets them" and at the same time claim he didnt know what he was doing. It works with the brain dead. 

Nick the Knife is proof that a Hispanic can be a racist.

He said nice things about me, of course, I don't care if he is a white supremacist, I'll do the old Two Step and meet him.

As the world turns.

I can't continue reading the story because the NY Times is blocked.  However, I'm surprised Trump didn't make it a bigger party - he didn't add Herschel Walker and Kyle Rittenhouse to it. 

Former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night had dinner with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken antisemite and racist who is one of the country's most prominent young white supremacists, at Mr. Trump's private club in Florida, advisers to Mr. Trump conceded on Friday.

Also at the dinner was the performer Kanye West, who has also been denounced for making antisemitic statements. Mr. West traveled to meet with Mr. Trump at the club, Mar-a-Lago, and brought Mr. Fuentes along, the advisers said.

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

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

A Holocaust denier and unabashed racist, Mr. Fuentes openly uses hateful language on his podcast, in recent weeks calling for the military to be sent into Black neighborhoods and demanding that Jews leave the country.

It is unclear how much Mr. Trump knew of Mr. Fuentes's well-documented bigotry and extremism before their dinner.

Citing people close to Mr. Trump, some earlier news coverage of Mr. West's visit to Mar-a-Lago had falsely reported that Mr. Fuentes did not attend the dinner.

During the dinner, according to a person briefed on what took place, Mr. Fuentes described himself as part of Mr. Trump's base of supporters. Mr. Trump remarked that his advisers urge him to read speeches using a teleprompter and don't like when he ad-libs remarks.

Mr. Fuentes said Mr. Trump's supporters preferred the ad-libs, at which Mr. Trump turned to the others, the person said, and declared that he liked Mr. Fuentes, adding: "He gets me."

In a statement on Friday, Mr. 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 Mr. Fuentes's views.

In a post later Friday on his social media website, Truth Social, Mr. Trump said that Mr. West "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."

Early Friday evening, Mr. Trump made a third attempt at defending himself, saying that Mr. West had sought business advice from him, "expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on 'Tucker Carlson.' Why wouldn't I agree to meet? I also, I didn't know Nick Fuentes."

Even taking at face value Mr. Trump's protestation that he knew nothing of Mr. Fuentes, the apparent ease with which Mr. Fuentes arrived at the home of a former president who is under multiple investigations — including one related to keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago long after he left office — underscores the undisciplined, uncontrolled nature of Mr. Trump's post-presidency just 10 days into his third campaign for the White House.

A handful of Republicans, including at least one close ally of Mr. Trump's, castigated him over meeting both Mr. Fuentes and Mr. West.

"To my friend Donald Trump, you are better than this," David M. Friedman, who was Mr. Trump's longtime bankruptcy lawyer and then his appointee as ambassador to Israel, wrote on Twitter. "Even a social visit from an antisemite like Kanye West and human scum like Nick Fuentes is unacceptable. I urge you to throw those bums out, disavow them and relegate them to the dustbin of history where they belong."

"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, a former governor of New Jersey who is considering a candidacy of his own.

In a statement that did not name Mr. Trump but was issued in response to the Fuentes dinner, Matt Brooks, chief executive 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 C.E.O. of the Anti-Defamation League, condemned Mr. Trump's meeting with Mr. Fuentes.

"Nick Fuentes is among the most prominent and unapologetic antisemites in the country," Mr. 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 R.J.C."

Mr. Greenblatt added that the idea that Mr. 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."

Mr. Fuentes, who attended the bloody far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, 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 Mr. Trump's defeat in 2020, Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. Fuentes led a crowd in chanting "Destroy the G.O.P.," and urged people not to vote in the January 2021 Georgia Senate runoff elections.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Fuentes led a large group of groypers to the Capitol where they rallied outside in support of Mr. Trump. The next day, Mr. 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, Mr. 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.

Mr. Christie speculated that hosting Mr. West and Mr. Fuentes served a desire particular to Mr. Trump: "He can't stand not having attention all the time," Mr. 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."

Mr. West, 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 Mr. Trump was "really impressed" with Mr. Fuentes.

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

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world net daily Wayne Allyn Root  my pick for biggest winner of the year is Donald J. Trump. Precisely because the whole world is against him. Because the odds are stacked against him. Because every “expert” in the media and political world thinks he’s “damaged goods.” For three weeks now every article in both liberal and conservative media has worked overtime to convince you Trump is finished.Yet despite all of the attacks, Trump is still standing. In perfect Trump in-your-face-style, he just announced he’s running for president of the United States again. And he’s still the prohibitive front-runner.

Three recent national polls tell the story. The latest Emerson poll has Trump ahead of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for the GOP presidential nomination by 30 points. The latest Harvard CAPS-Harris poll “only” has Trump up by 18 points. Another poll shows Trump leading Biden for president 44 to 42, while DeSantis is only tied with Biden.After all the hate, vitriol, slander, blame, unprecedented raids on his home and premature political obituaries by the media, Trump is still the front-runner to become the 47th president of the United States.That makes him my “Annual Root Turkey Award” winner of the year.

But close behind, nipping at his heels, is a tie between DeSantis and the entire state of Florida. Florida makes my list of winners of the year for having the best governor in America; the best economy in America; the most freedom from lockdowns, masks and dangerous vaccines of any state in America; and the best election fraud prevention system in America.DeSantis made sure no one can rig, cheat or steal elections in Florida. There are no universal mail-in ballots allowed; no ballot drop boxes; no ballot harvesting; no counting ballots for days after Election Day; the strictest laws against voter fraud in the nation … and Florida has voter ID requirements. Because of that, you can’t cheat in Florida.Result? The GOP won a red wave landslide in Florida. DeSantis and Rubio won in landslides.

The GOP won everything up and down the ticket – proving if there’s no cheating, Democrats have no chance.If every state in America had the same rules preventing voter fraud as Florida, Republicans would control the White House, Senate and House by a landslide.That brings me to the point of this column. Here is both a Thanksgiving wish and election strategy that puts the GOP on the road to victory. My two Annual Turkey Day winners need to put their differences and egos aside and join forces to save America.Trump/DeSantis 2024.Trump was the greatest president of my lifetime. DeSantis is the greatest governor of my lifetime. Why should we have to choose?