Trump’s dinner with antisemites provides test of GOP response to extremism
Former president Donald Trump’s refusal to apologize for or disavow the outspoken antisemites he dined with recently week is setting him increasingly at odds with leaders of his own party, providing the first test of his political endurance since launching his third run for the White House.
The fracas is also testing how Republicans will handle its extreme fringe in the months ahead after years of racist, misogynist and antisemitic speech flooding into the political bloodstream during the Trump era.
Trump has been taken aback by the backlash and maintained that the controversy over his Mar-aLago dinner with white nationalist Nick Fuentes and the rapper Ye, who has been vocally spouting antisemitic conspiracy theories, would blow over, according to advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential conversations. “I think it’s dying down,” they recalled Trump saying.
But the wave of denunciations only intensified as lawmakers returned to Washington from the Thanksgiving holiday this week, breaking a well-worn pattern of dodging or shrugging off Trump’s controversies during much of his presidency, possibly ushering in a new phase of more vocal criticism of him.
“We have to stop the whispered concerns and veiled statements, and we have to stand up for the principles and the beliefs that our country and party were founded on,” former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the first potential 2024 candidate to condemn Trump on the dinner, said on Wednesday. “There is no place for antisemitism or white supremacists in the Republican Party and no place for anyone who gives people like Nick Fuentes the time of day. Donald Trump’s recent