The White House strongly denounced former President Donald Trump’s dinner at Mar-a-Lago last week with notorious racist and antisemite Nick Fuentes and Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, whose antisemitic tweets were recently blocked on Twitter.
“Bigotry, hate, and antisemitism have absolutely no place in America — including at Mar-A-Lago,” the White House said in a statement. “Holocaust denial is repugnant and dangerous, and it must be forcefully condemned.”
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When reporters asked President Joe Biden for his opinion about the dinner Saturday during his trip to Nantucket for a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, he snapped: “You don’t want to hear what I think.”
The Mar-a-Lago dinner blew up in Trump’s face less than two weeks after he declared that he was running for president.
The dinner was first revealed in a video posted last Friday by Ye, who claimed he asked Trump to be his vice president, and that the former president “screamed” at him.
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The former president has claimed on Truth Social that he had no idea who Fuentes was when he accompanied Ye to dinner last Tuesday.
But the two men hit it off, according to sources. Ye said in his video that the former president was “very impressed” with Fuentes. According to witness reports, Trump even praised the Holocaust denier at dinner. “He gets me,” Trump reportedly said.
Fuentes is a high-profile right-wing extremist supported by key allies of Trump, like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.). Both lawmakers spoke at a white supremacist conference organized by Fuentes early this year. That triggered heated controversy, which was widely and prominently covered by the media and was apparently overlooked by Trump.
In yet another bid to backpedal from his damaging dinner, Trump turned on Ye in a Truth Social post Saturday, calling him a “seriously troubled man” to whom he offered advice at dinner. On Friday, Trump insisted in a post that the rapper “expressed no antisemitism” while dining.
In October, Ye vowed on Twitter to go “death con 3 on Jews.”
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Matt Brooks, chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, issued a statement Friday, without naming Trump, saying: “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.”
Trump just spoke a week ago via video livestream to an RJC meeting in Las Vegas.
The RJC also retweeted a message from former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who called Fuentes “human scum, and informed Trump that his meeting with both the antisemitic Ye and Fuentes was “unacceptable.”
