The Mysterious Fourth Man At The Trump-Ye Dinner Tells His Story

When former President Donald Trump held a now-infamous dinner last month with .

Montgomery speculated the call may have been related to a mistakenly sent text message. During the dinner, Ye attempted to send a message to Fuentes, only to accidentally send it to an attorney, Montgomery recalled. Trump received a call shortly thereafter. A spokesperson for the attorney in question, Nick Gravante, denied to Newsweek that Gravante made any call to Trump nor anyone in his orbit.

It was a noticeable shift: Trump crossed his arms. “His whole tone changed, his whole demeanor changed. He said some things about Kim Kardashian. And at first I was like, ‘You must be talking about somebody else,’ and when I realized who he was talking about, I was like, ‘Whoa.’” (Ye mentioned Trump insulting Kardashian as well.)

After Montgomery noted that he’d appreciated Trump inviting historically Black college and university leaders to the White House as president, Trump began speaking about “some of his Black constituents that he felt didn’t thank him enough for what he did for them.”

Trump specifically mentioned rapper A$AP Rocky and basketball player LiAngelo Ball, Montgomery recalled. Both men were detained overseas by authorities in Sweden and China, respectively, during Trump’s tenure, and in both cases Trump intervened to assist the men. (Whether this actually helped is a different story.)

Trump recalled “how he was talking to the other presidents of the other countries, and negotiating with them about getting them out,” Montgomery recalled. “He felt that the people that he had helped hadn’t thanked him enough.”

“If I could do it again, I wouldn’t,” Montgomery recalled Trump saying.

At some point after the call, Ye also asked Trump to be his running mate for 2024. Trump declined “in so many words,” Montgomery recalled, and urged Ye not to run, raising his voice.

“You can’t win!” Trump yelled at Ye, Montgomery recalled. “I have a base of 125 million people! You can’t win.” Trump looked at Fuentes, urging him, “You’ve got to tell him the truth, you’re a smart guy, you’ve got to tell him the truth that he can’t win!” He told Giorno, “Yeah, you’ll get consulting fees off of this, but you’ve got to tell him the truth that he can’t win!”

It was only after the dinner that Montgomery was able to research Fuentes and Yiannopoulos, he said.

“I’ve fought against those kinds of people and that ideology for my entire adult life,” he said. In a tweet a few days after the dinner, he called out police in Shreveport, Louisiana, for not stepping in when in 2020, “ARMED Neo Confederates and Neo Nazis came across the street and snatched signs and berated our demonstrators.”

“I have family members who fought against Nazis,” he said later. “I fight against Nazism.”

Learning about Fuentes’ and Yiannopolous’ views was disappointing, he said. Referring to the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot – Fuentes attended the first and spoke at a rally on the eve of the latter — Montgomery emphasized the First Amendment’s right to peaceably assemble. “The challenge is when one group decides that one group has the right to exercise that right, and another group does not.”

And what about Ye, who had already publicly promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories before the Mar-a-Lago dinner?

“Ye’s very well aware of how I feel. I didn’t mince words,” Montgomery said, adding that he told the rapper, “anything that does not unite this country, that seeks to divide, that seeks to treat people as if they’re less than others, is not of God.”

He declined to detail his conversations with Ye further, including whether or not the two have spoken since the dinner. He said Thursday night that he hadn’t seen Ye’s appearance a few hours earlier on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars program. Asked if he would respond to quotes from Ye praising Hitler and the Nazis, Montgomery said he’d prefer to watch the program himself, “and get full context.”

He veered into a discussion of history, including that of slave-owning U.S. presidents who are still celebrated today; and Belgium’s King Leopold II, whose bloody colonial reign resulted in the deaths of millions of Congolese people. The United States, he said, should confront the evils of slavery, Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration and the economic disenfranchisement of African Americans as a “permanent underclass.”

“If we’re going to fight against evil, we cannot be selective,” Montgomery said.

He added separately, “Ye is his own man, with his own thoughts, with his own words that he’s going to be responsible and accountable for.”

Still, Montgomery has appeared to defend Ye at times, even after the superstar made numerous antisemitic remarks. Montgomery has said Ye and NBA player Kyrie Irving were “financially lynched.”

In an Instagram video on Nov. 4, Montgomery referred to Ye and Irving: “We’re holding these men responsible for their words as if they’re the most educated individuals of our group, as if they intentionally said these words to be offensive. It’s unfair to go after these men’s character, and calling them antisemitic.” He later urged people to “come to the table in good faith,” but asked, “why is this even an issue in the first place? It’s an athlete and an entertainer.”

A few days prior, on Oct. 25, Montgomery said that while many people were upset with Ye, “I’m not one of them.” He added, “With all of the quote-unquote cancellations that are going on right now, it’s only proving his point that, here it is, you can offend this group of people, and these are the consequences.”

In the same video, Montgomery noted the common response to Ye’s comments: That he should simply call out individual people who’ve screwed him over in business deals. But if Ye only went after specific people, Montgomery said, “well, there’s going to be others who sit there and defend that individual. People who are colluding and utilizing their power against Kanye West. And we, as Black people, we should not be abandoning our brother.”

Asked Thursday about that video, and whether Ye should have called out individuals rather than an entire religion, Montgomery said, “He could have did a number of things. But he chose the route that he decided to choose.”