Last Tuesday, one week after announcing his 2024 presidential campaign, former President Donald Trump hosted anti-Semite billionaire rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, and fascist Nicholas Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
According to multiple reports, the three, along with a Trump political adviser, held a cordial dinner meeting that lasted for roughly two hours.
West a longtime admirer of Trump, has vented his hatred of Jews publicly in the last few months. After the rapper released an unapologetic torrent of anti-Semitic bile in multiple online and television interviews, he was dropped as a paid endorser by several major corporations, including Adidas.
Despite, or more likely because of, his remarks, West was welcomed by the former president to his home last week. Trump confirmed the dinner on his personal social media platform, Truth Social, writing on Friday that Ye “was asking me for advice concerning some of his difficulties, in particular, having to do with his business.
“We also discussed,” Trump wrote, “politics, where I told him he should definitely not run for president, ‘any voters you may have should vote for TRUMP.’”
The 2024 Republican front-runner added that the pair “got along great” and that West “expressed no anti-Semetism, [sic] & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on ‘Tucker Carlson.’ Why wouldn’t I agree to meet?”
Trump ended the post, “Also, I didn’t know Nick Fuentes.”
The claim that Trump does not know who Fuentes was, or that he would be joining him for dinner, has no credibility.
As a former president, Trump is afforded around-the-clock Secret Service protection. There is no way someone is allowed to enter Trump’s compound without first getting cleared by the agency.
Furthermore, Trump, a prolific liar, has repeatedly claimed that he did not know detestable right-wing figures or groups, even after it was demonstrably proven that he did. In an infamous interview before the 2016 election, Trump claimed three separate times he did not know who Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke was, after Duke endorsed him.
He then claimed that because he allegedly did not know Duke, he could not disavow his support or the support of the Klan for his campaign.
Four years later, as Trump was in the midst of planning to overturn the election in October 2020, he was asked multiple times by journalists if he disavowed support he received online from QAnon fascists.
The QAnon conspiracy posits that Trump will head a fascist “storm” that will end in the violent purge of Trump’s “deep-state” enemies, which include Satan-worshipping/child-sacrificing Democrats.
Trump claimed he did not know the group, besides the fact that it was “very much against pedophilia,” a stand which he agreed with.
Since his failed coup, Trump has openly embraced QAnon. He routinely posts QAnon memes on Truth Social and during the last months of the midterm campaign, he ended his fascist rallies with a QAnon-linked song piped in over his closing remarks.
After the dinner became public last week, West/Ye announced that he would be running for president in 2024 and that he had already hired fascist commentator and Republican operative Milo Yiannopoulos as his campaign manager.
In a video released on Thursday which featured Ye and Yiannopoulos, Ye claimed that he asked Trump to be his vice president, which Trump declined.
Ye added that Trump was “really impressed with Nick Fuentes.”
“Unlike so many of the lawyers, and so many of the people he was left with on his 2020 campaign, [Fuentes] is actually a loyalist,” Ye remarked.
In an anti-Semitic screed posted Sunday night on Gab, a far-right social media platform, Yiannopoulos wrote that Ye and Fuentes “didn’t discredit” the Trump campaign with their dinner meeting.
“Trump,” Yiannopoulos wrote, “did that himself ... by continuing to suck the boots of the Jewish powers that be who hate Jesus Christ, hate our country, and see us all as disposable cattle.”
Appealing directly to Christian nationalists and fascists, Yiannopoulos added that Trump “WILL start putting Jesus Christ first ... or he WILL be left in the dust of someone who does. ... We’re done putting Jewish interests first.”
While Trump consorting with Ye is hardly surprising—the rapper has been an enthusiastic backer of the fascistic president and now ex-president for several years—the fact that Trump chose to meet Ye with Fuentes is highly significant and a further expression of the embrace of fascism by the ruling class.
Fuentes is not just another “far-right” operative. He is an unapologetic racist, Christian reactionary, admirer of Adolf Hitler and Holocaust denier. In addition to glorifying Hitler, Fuentes has called for violence against blacks, Jews, women, immigrants and LGBTQ persons. Fuentes’ words have led to real-life violence and death.
After dropping out of Boston University in 2017, Fuentes has been heavily involved in far-right politics. He launched his “America First” online program shortly after Trump’s 2016 victory. On the program, which was inspired by Trump, Fuentes has stated that his goal is to push the Republican Party to the right.
Beginning in 2020, Fuentes launched the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) to counter the more mainstream Conservative Political Action Conference. Previous speakers at AFPAC include former Republican Congressman Steve King (Iowa) and current Republican politicians and open fascists, Representatives Paul Gosar (Arizona) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia.)
Fuentes and several of his followers, calling themselves “groypers.” participated in the fascist “Unite the Right” Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which ended after neo-Nazi James Fields drove his vehicle into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters, injuring several and killing 32-year-old anti-racist activist Heather Heyer.
Fuentes and his America First group played a leading role in the “Stop the Steal” movement in furtherance of Trump’s failed coup.
On November 11, 2020, Fuentes from the steps of the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing told a crowd of Trump supporters that they needed to be “more feral” when it came to overturning the election. Fuentes and his followers, in between November and January 6, 2021, also rallied in support of Trump’s stolen election lies in Wisconsin, Washington D.C., and Atlanta, Georgia.
At the Georgia rally, held in mid-November, Fuentes was joined by fellow “Stop the Steal” fascists Alex Jones and Ali Alexander.
In view of his prominent role in support of Trump’s coup, Fuentes was subpoenaed by the January 6 Select Committee earlier this year. In its letter requesting his appearance, the House committee noted that Fuentes and his followers were at the Capitol on January 6, with some members of his group spotted inside the Capitol. At least eight members of the group have been charged with crimes related to the attempted coup.
Despite his leading role in organizing Trump’s most violent and racist supporters, Fuentes, like Trump and dozens of other high-level Republican operatives and politicians, has yet to be charged with a crime in relation to January 6.
After his dinner with Trump, Fuentes was gushing on his program, telling his followers that Trump “told me he liked me,” and that it was “unbelievable” having “Thanksgiving dinner with my two favorite people, Ye and Donald Trump.”