Fresh off his announcement that he will run again for president in the 2024 election, Donald Trump has admitted that he dined at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida with disgraced rapper Kanye West and a white nationalist Tuesday.
“This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social app Friday. “Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about. We had dinner on Tuesday evening with many members present on the back patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful. They then left for the airport.”
The admission only came after reports in Axios and Politico that the musician, who legally changed his name to Ye, had brought with him Nick Fuentes, a far-right bigot who attended the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and who wants Republicans to move further to the right and maintain the US as a country predominantly for white Christians.
Trump insisted in another Truth Social post that he did not know who Fuentes was, but defended his decision to dine with Ye, whose business empire has collapsed in a matter of weeks due, in part, to his comments against Jewish people and embrace of “White Lives Matter” imagery.
“We got along great, he expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on Tucker Carlson,” Trump wrote. “Why wouldn’t I agree to meet?”
News of Trump’s decision to dine with the pair alarmed even his advisers, some of whom spoke anonymously with media outlets to criticize him. “This is a fucking nightmare,” one Trump adviser told NBC News. “If people are looking at [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis to run against Trump, here’s another reason why.”
“Even a social visit from an antisemite like Kanye West and human scum like Nick Fuentes is unacceptable,” tweeted David Friedman, who served as US ambassador to Israel under Trump. “I urge you to throw those bums out, disavow them and relegate them to the dustbin of history where they belong.”
In a video on Twitter, Ye described details of the dinner and said Trump was “really impressed with Nick Fuentes.”
“Nick Fuentes, unlike so many of the lawyers and so many people that he was left with on his 2020 campaign, he’s actually a loyalist,” said Ye.
Ye, who is mounting a ludicrous run for president himself, said Trump became angry at the dinner only when the rapper asked him to be his running mate.
“When Trump started basically screaming at me at the table, telling me I was going to lose. I mean, has that ever worked for anyone in history?” Ye said. “I’m like, ‘Whoa, whoa, hold on, hold on, Trump, you’re talking to Ye.’”
In addition to Ye’s bigotry, the rapper is being investigated by Adidas over claims that he showed workers explicit pictures and videos, including an intimate photo of his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian.
