Trump’s embrace of antisemite is emblematic of long-time GOP shift

“Well, he certainly needs better judgment in who he dines with,” said Rep. James Comer, R-KY., while seeking to minimize the fact that his party’s leader just chose to spend an evening with a group of known Holocaust deniers and antisemites. He approached the situation as though he was talking about a puppy leaving an unexpected “present” on the rug. “Haha, look how cute the systemic extinction of 6 million Jews is! So adorable ...”

Then reality stinks in.

At least when puppies go No. 2 somewhere unexpected, they don’t know any better. Former President Donald Trump can’t credibly say the same.

Oh sure, he tried to distance himself by saying he didn’t know who Nick Fuentes was. And given how incredibly incompetent Trump has proven himself to be over the past, well, forever, we could almost believe him. But then the smell hits your nose and reality hits. Even after he was educated on the matter, Trump failed to condemn Fuentes. That was telling, as it means Trump considers white supremacists an important part of his base. Sadly, he’s right.

To view his latest dinner with Ye — the rapper formerly known as Kanye West — and Fuentes as merely a failure to vet that night’s guest list ignores the fact that the Republican Party has for years been sharing a table with violent extremists.

After rejecting segregationist Southern Democrats and signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Lyndon Johnson remarked that “We (Democrats) have lost the South for a generation.” It turns out it was two generations and counting, as the GOP welcomed Jim Crow with open arms.

Subsequent rhetoric, ranging from Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” to the evangelical anti-gay catchphrase “love the sinner, hate the sin,” and attacks on Black victims of police violence continue to betray this bias.

Hate was embedded in the dark basement of the GOP long before the 2016 presidential election, but by providing tacit support for hateful tropes and conspiracies, Trump opened the door for militant white supremacists and white nationalists to take their place at the head of the dinner table.

By embracing “good people on both sides,” he invited David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and a Republican member of the Louisiana state Assembly, to say the quiet part out loud and endorse Trump publicly.

And Trump forced moderate Republicans into a choice of either leaving the party or forming a clearly visible alliance with extremism.

Perhaps worse is that Trump’s new Republican coalition isn’t even trying to hide who it is. And for Trump to even pretend that he didn’t know about the antisemitic controversies surrounding both Ye and Fuentes is simply a lie.

It was just six years ago when then-president-elect Trump stood in Trump Tower with his arms around Ye and told reporters that “We’ve been friends for a long time.”

Of course, Trump claims to have many friends. While campaigning in 2016, he told Fox News that “I have many Jewish friends.”

None of these friends, Ye included, thought to warn Trump about Fuentes or even considered the idea that the ex-president might disapprove of antisemitism.

This isn’t entirely surprising either. After all, two of Trump’s most ardent supporters in the House of Representatives, Paul Gosar of Arizona and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, have both faced criticism in the past for their associations with Fuentes, and even spoke at a white nationalist conference organized by him. Not only did Trump and the Republican Party choose to keep them in their ranks, but House Minority Leader Kevin Mccarthy has also promised them both important committee assignments should he become speaker in the next term.

Rallying and organizing with Nazis isn’t a deal breaker in the Republican Party.

Which brings us to the truly disturbing part of this whole saga. While Trump may have opened the GOP tent flaps to overt extremism, it is the party itself holding the flaps open today.

In an editorial last weekend, The Wall Street Journal argued that voters should turn away from Trump and embrace a new generation of Republican leaders such as Florida Gov. Ron Desantis. But while they may legitimately hope that Desantis is the answer to Trump’s extremism, the evidence doesn’t support it.

Desantis has actively courted conspiratorial supporters of Qanon, suggested that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a setup by the FBI and accused media outlets discussing the attack on the U.S. Capitol of engaging in a “smear campaign” against Trump. He publicly denounced Rep. Liz Cheney, R-wyo., for participating in the House select committee investigating the insurrection but refused to denounce a gang of Nazis who came to Florida intent on threatening and intimidating Jewish residents.

Apparently, defending Trump against the investigation of a violent attack perpetrated by Trump’s supporters is more important to Desantis than defending Floridians from violence being perpetrated against them in their own neighborhoods.

As of press time, Desantis also had yet to condemn Trump’s Mar-a-lago dinner with Ye and Fuentes, despite it happening in his own backyard. His silence is deafening.

Desantis has positioned himself as a potential challenger to Trump and a future leader of the new Republican Party. He has found the time to recruit and fly immigrants in other states on million-dollar politically motivated government-funded relocation missions, yet he hasn’t found the time to condemn antisemitism or call on the former president to “do better” moving forward. Excuse our language, but that’s more than puppy poo, that’s some BS.

Republicans made a deal with the devil long ago — they accepted horrors in their ranks to win elections. Now the horrors threaten to overwhelm all rational actors within the party.

It’s time for a focused and concerted stand by the GOP to reject racism, Nazis, antisemites, militias and all the rest of the monsters they’ve been tolerating — before the monsters take over. That means the Trumps, Desantises, Greenes, Gosars, Proud Boys, Oathkeepers and more must be shown the door and told in no unclear terms that they have no place in the Republican Party.