Trump hosts Ye, white supremacist at club

Former President Donald 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 Trump’s private club in Florida, advisers to Trump conceded Friday.

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

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

In recent years, Fuentes, 24, has developed a high profile on the far right and forged ties with such Republican lawmakers as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Rep. 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, 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 Trump knew of Fuentes’ well-documented bigotry and extremism before their dinner. In a statement, Trump said: “Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mara-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 Fuentes’ views.

Even taking at face value Trump’s protestation that he knew nothing of Fuentes, the apparent ease with which 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 Trump’s post-presidency as he embarks on a third campaign for the White House.

“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.

Ye posted a video on Twitter in which he described the dinner. He claimed that Trump was “really impressed” with Fuentes.