Rightwing provocateur says he helped arrange for white
supremacist to attend dinner with Trump and Kanye West
@adamgabbatt
Wed 30 Nov
2022 15.13 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/30/milo-yiannopoulos-nick-fuentes-donald-trump-dinner
As fallout
from Donald Trump’s meeting with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes continues,
a far-right activist has claimed the meeting was a set-up, meant to “make
Trump’s life miserable”.
NBC News
reported that in an attempt to “send a message” to the former president, Milo
Yiannopoulos, a rightwing provocateur and former Breitbart editor, helped
arrange for Fuentes to travel to Mar-a-Lago in Florida for a dinner between
Trump and the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.
Trump dined
with Fuentes and Ye at his resort on 22 November. Since the meeting, Trump has
been criticized by senior Republicans and by conservative Jewish leaders.
Trump said
Ye was invited to dinner and “unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends
… whom I knew nothing about”. He has not condemned Fuentes and his views.
Fuentes has been described by the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League
as “among the most prominent and unapologetic antisemites in the country”.
Speaking to
NBC, Yiannopoulos said he came up with a plan for Fuentes to travel with Ye and
hopefully gain access to the former president.
“I wanted
to show Trump the kind of talent that he’s missing out on by allowing his
terrible handlers to dictate who he can and can’t hang out with,” Yiannopoulos
said.
“I also
wanted to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly
neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most, the people who put
him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end.”
Yiannopoulos
was once a leading figure in the alt-right movement but he has been banned by
most major social media networks and lost a book deal in 2017 after appearing
to endorse paedophilia.
He told NBC
he also arranged the meeting “just to make Trump’s life miserable”, because he
was aware news of the dinner would leak.
Trump has
engaged with racists in the past, including claiming there were “very fine
people on both sides” of a white supremacist rally in Virginia which resulted
in the death of a counter-protester.
Criticism
for hosting Fuentes has come from senior Republicans including his former
vice-president, Mike Pence, and the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie.
On Tuesday,
Fuentes disputed Yiannapoulos’s suggestion the dinner was an attempt to make
Trump’s life miserable.
“This is
just not true at all,” Fuentes said on the messaging app Telegram, below a
screenshot from the NBC article. “My intention was not to hurt Trump by
attending the dinner, that is fake news. I love Donald Trump.”
Ye, who
like Trump is running for president in 2024, said he used the dinner to ask
Trump to be his vice-president, only for Trump to insult his ex-wife, Kim
Kardashian.
“Trump
started basically screaming at me at the table telling me I was going to lose,”
Ye said in a video since deleted from social media but transcribed by Newsweek.
“I mean, has that ever worked for anyone in history? I’m like, ‘Woah, woah hold
on hold on Trump, you’re talking to Ye.’”
Ye also
said Trump was “really impressed” by Fuentes.
A source
close to Trump told NBC the former president was left furious by the meeting.
“He’s
crazy. He can’t beat me,” Trump said of Ye, according to the source, who also said
“Trump was totally blindsided” by Fuentes’s presence, adding: “It was a
set-up.”
On
Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that Trump’s campaign was “putting new
protocols in place to ensure that those who meet with him are approved and
fully vetted”. Among those protocols, the AP said, citing unnamed sources, is a
requirement that Trump is accompanied by a senior official at all times.
The inside story of Trump’s explosive dinner with
Ye and Nick Fuentes
What was supposed to be a private dinner ended up
being a political nightmare.
Nov. 29,
2022, 7:05 PM CET
By Marc
Caputo
Just two
days before Thanksgiving, Donald Trump was planning to have a private,
uneventful dinner with an old friend: Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye
West.
The two had
arranged to break bread Tuesday night at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida
after weeks of private phone conversations as Ye lost lucrative partnerships
and became a mainstream cultural pariah for his antisemitic remarks, according
to those familiar with the talks between the two men.
But Trump
may have been walking into a trap in Mar-a-Lago’s gilded halls — one that
leveraged his own penchant for spectacle and showmanship against him. Ye
arrived with three guests, including white nationalist and antisemite Nick
Fuentes.
Trump has
since said he didn’t know Fuentes or his background when they dined together, a
claim Fuentes confirmed in an interview, but others at the crowded members-only
club figured out his identity. News of the meeting prompted an avalanche of
criticism, from some Republican rivals and allies of Trump and his then-week-old
presidential campaign.
In damage
control, Trump’s campaign is now instituting new vetting procedures and
gatekeeping efforts as details emerge about how Fuentes and the former
president found themselves at the same table, according to two people briefed
on the plans.
The uproar
underscores long-standing issues with Trump as Republicans consider whether
they want him back as president again in 2024.
Both his
campaigns and his administration were often characterized by chaos and buffeted
by the consequences of his impulses as they stumbled from crisis to crisis. And
Trump has repeatedly put himself in the center of controversies over racism,
from falsely accusing the first Black president of not being a natural-born
citizen to announcing his 2016 presidential bid by portraying most Mexican
migrants as rapists and drug runners.
‘The master
troll got trolled’
The
headline-grabbing attention on his guests — and therefore the subsequent
fallout — were all but ensured by Trump before the dinner when he made a grand
entrance at about 8 p.m. on Nov. 22 to meet his guests.
“We saw
everybody in the dining room get up and start applauding, and then the
president entered,” Fuentes told NBC News. “He greeted us, and he invited Ye
into dinner and Ye said that he wanted to bring us with him to the table. So we
walked in and Ye took some pictures with some of the guests in the dining room
and then we sat down at the table.”
Trump made
sure they sat at his specially reserved table on the patio, for all to see, according
to Fuentes.
But the
dinner wasn’t the happy photo-op the president had planned.
Ye
criticized Trump for not doing enough to help pay the legal bills of those
arrested in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots; and he also told Trump he might run for
president against him and said Trump should instead be his running mate — all
of which angered the former president, who attacked Ye’s ex-wife, Kim
Kardashian, according to two dinner participants and Ye, who blasted out a
“Mar-a-Lago debrief” video to his 32.2 million Twitter followers the next day.
“Trump is
really impressed with Nick Fuentes,” Ye said in the video.
Fuentes
said that he praised Trump as “my hero” and criticized Florida Gov. Ron
DeSantis for his potential GOP primary challenge to Trump, but he also told him
to his face at the dinner that the onetime 2016 insurgent was in danger of
becoming a scripted establishment bore who could lose in 2024.
Some
Republicans, including former Vice President Mike Pence, have condemned the
dinner, with Pence calling on Trump to apologize.
One
longtime Trump adviser, who didn’t want to go on the record criticizing his
preferred candidate, said it was clear that Fuentes’ presence was part of a
headline-grabbing setup.
“The master
troll got trolled,” the adviser said. “Kanye punked Trump.”
As advisers
to Trump have attempted to quell the backlash, some have insisted that the
former president was essentially tricked by the rapper and his guests — a
suspicion backed up by Milo Yiannopoulos, the anti-Trump, far-right provocateur
who is now acting as a political adviser to Ye.
Nick
Fuentes speaks as America First protesters are gathered in front of the Gracie
Mansion to protest vaccination mandates in New York City on Nov. 13, 2021.
Nick
Fuentes speaks as America First protesters are gathered in front of the Gracie
Mansion to protest vaccination mandates in New York City on Nov. 13, 2021.
Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images file
Yiannopoulos,
a former Breitbart editor who was banned from Twitter in 2016 for inciting a
racist campaign against the comedian Leslie Jones, told NBC News that he was
“the architect” of the plan to have Fuentes travel with Ye in the hopes of
slipping him into the dinner with Trump. The intent, according to Yiannopoulos,
was for Fuentes to give Trump an unvarnished view of how a portion of his base
views his candidacy.
Yiannopoulos
persuaded a former Trump 2016 campaign adviser from Florida, Karen Giorno, to
give Ye a ride to Mar-a-Lago, which she said led her to become an accidental
member of Ye’s dinner party. Yiannopoulos said he also wanted Giorno to brief
Ye on Trump and politics and, if she went to the dinner, to lend a sense of
political gravitas to the discussion. The fourth member of the party was a man
Ye later identified as a parent of a student at his private school in
California, Donda Academy. (Donda shut down for the year after Ye’s antisemitic
remarks.) Yiannopoolos said he was unsure of why the man traveled with them.
Yiannopoulos
said Fuentes is serving in an advisory capacity to Ye. Giorno is not an
official member of the unofficial Ye campaign team but flew to Los Angeles to
meet with them this week.
“I wanted
to show Trump the kind of talent that he’s missing out on by allowing his
terrible handlers to dictate who he can and can’t hang out with,” Yiannopoulos
told NBC News.
“I also
wanted to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly
neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most, the people who put
him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end,” he
added.
And, Yiannopoulos
said, he arranged the dinner “just to make Trump’s life miserable” because news
of the dinner would leak and Trump would mishandle it.
Fuentes
echoed the sentiment: “I hate to say it, but the chickens are coming home to
roost. You know, this is the frustration with his base and with his true
loyalists.”
Trump fumed
afterward that Ye had betrayed him by ambushing him. “He tried to f--- me. He’s
crazy. He can’t beat me,” Trump said, according to one confidant, who then
relayed the conversation to NBC News on the condition of anonymity to discuss
private conversations.
“Trump was
totally blindsided,” the source said of Fuentes’ presence. “It was a setup.”
Some in
Trump’s orbit had cautioned him not to have dinner with Ye, under fire for
antisemitism, in the first place, according to two sources who had been briefed
on an internal damage assessment the campaign performed after the controversy
erupted.
But Trump
is known for refusing to heed cautious counsel, guardrails and gatekeepers. So
he went ahead with the dinner alone, telling confidants that he thought Ye
needed his counsel. One confidant told NBC that Trump acknowledged he wanted
the rapper to be seen because “it would be fun for the members” of Mar-a-Lago.
Trump
issued three successive statements in as many days on his Truth Social media
platform admitting Fuentes was there while disavowing knowledge of his identity
prior to and during the dinner.
But none of
his statements disavowed the hate speech associated with Fuentes, prompting
more criticism that the former president is reluctant to distance himself too
much from racists because they’re part of his political base of support.
“Ye,
formerly known as Kanye West, was asking me for advice concerning some of his
difficulties, in particular ‘having to do with his business,’” Trump said in
his last statement about the dinner, issued Saturday. “We also discussed, to a
lesser extent, politics, where I told him he should definitely not run for
President, ‘any voters you may have should vote for TRUMP.’ Anyway, we got
along great, he expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice
things he said about me on ‘Tucker Carlson.’ Why wouldn’t I agree to meet?
Also, I didn’t know Nick Fuentes.”
Amid the
backlash, however, the campaign began reviewing internal procedures to ensure
someone like Fuentes never winds up with Trump again, according to two sources
familiar with the discussions.
U.S. Secret
Service distanced itself from the incident and said in a statement Monday that,
as “a private club,” Mar-a-Lago’s security is in charge of “who may have been
allowed access to their facilities.”
On Monday,
Ye, Yiannopoulos and Fuentes were scheduled to discuss how the dinner came
together in a joint appearance on a conservative webcast, but the rapper
stormed out after he was challenged about his statements suggesting Jewish
people control banks and the news media.
His
entourage followed.
Getting
into Mar-a-Lago
The
pre-Thanksgiving dinner was the third shock to ripple through Trump’s
presidential campaign, which was exactly one week old on the night of the
dinner.
Hours
before the turkey and stuffing were served, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered
Trump to turn over his income tax forms to Congress, capping a yearslong fight
that followed Trump’s declaration in 2014 that he would “love” to release them
if he ran for president. And four days before the Ye dinner, on Nov. 18, the
Justice Department appointed a special counsel to examine the Jan. 6, 2021,
U.S. Capitol riots and Trump’s possession of highly sensitive government
documents at Mar-a-Lago when he was no longer president.
Hours
before Ye’s flight arrived in Florida, Yiannopoulos enticed Giorno to pick up
the rapper in Miami and take him to Mar-a-Lago, 70 miles away. Giorno said that
Yiannopoulos only told her that Ye would be with two people, including someone
named “Nick,” but he didn’t give a last name. Yiannopoulos confirmed that he
gave limited information to Giorno.
Both say
Giorno was not told in advance of the plan to confront Trump.
But some
Trump loyalists and advisers in Trump’s inner circle still fault Giorno for not
giving the former president or his team a heads-up about Fuentes, whose
identity she said she learned on the drive.
“Given
Milo’s multiyear, anti-Trump posts since 2020 and his self-proclaimed desire to
get a vengeance on President Donald Trump, Karen Giorno cannot in good faith
say that she didn’t know what Milo was planning to do … Karen and Milo set
Trump up to make him look bad,” said Laura Loomer, a Trump loyalist who ran for
Congress in Florida in 2020 and hired Giorno, who then met and hired
Yiannopoulos to work for Loomer.
Both had
separate clashes with Giorno, in 2022 and 2020, respectively. Yiannopoulos and
Giorno dismissed Loomer’s criticisms as the result of their falling out.
Loomer was
one of the first high-profile right-wing activists banned from Twitter in 2018,
after calling one of the nation’s first Muslim congresswomen, Democrat Ilhan
Omar of Minnesota, “anti Jewish” and attacking Islam for abusing women.
Loomer also
criticized Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., for being complicit in the
alleged Trump setup because she is an ally of Yiannopoulos and had hired him as
a summer intern.
A
spokesperson for Greene denied the accusation of her involvement but declined
to comment further to NBC News; Greene fired back at Loomer on her Telegram
social media channel. Greene also has a Fuentes connection: She spoke at his
America First Political Action confab in Florida in February but then said she
didn’t know who he was.
Giorno said
she had been caught in the blast radius of the dinner with Ye and Fuentes but
was an unwitting participant. On the night she drove the crew to Mar-a-Lago,
she said, she didn’t realize there was going to be a confrontation and she
didn’t have time to call or text anyone with a heads-up because Ye’s flight
landed about 5 p.m., in the middle of the South Florida metropolis’ rush hour
on a rainy day. It took the party three hours to get to Mar-a-Lago, double what
it normally takes.
About
halfway to Mar-a-Lago, Giorno said in an interview, she realized that Ye,
Fuentes and the other man weren’t properly attired.
“All of you
are wearing jeans. Did they not tell you about the dress code?” she said she
asked.
Ye said he
hadn’t been informed and that “I doubt Nick is going to get in anyway.”
“Nick,” she
said she asked, “what’s your last name?”
Fuentes
gave his last name.
“I’m going
to kill Milo,” Giorno said she thought.
Giorno kept
driving and said they would probably have trouble getting into Mar-a-Lago
because of private security and Secret Service. Giorno said she also realized
she had forgotten her driver’s license, so she had to use a credit card with
her name on it to prove her identity to get in.
Because she
had Ye in her car and she is a frequent visitor to the property, having
attended Trump’s campaign announcement seven days before, Giorno said, the four
of them were able to get in.
Trump met
the party in the foyer and warmly greeted everyone, but he was puzzled that his
old adviser was somehow with Ye, Giorno said. Giorno said she tried to leave
Trump with Ye privately.
“Sir, it’s
really good to see you again,” she said she told Trump. “My understanding is
you’re supposed to have a private meeting with Ye and I’m happy to go to the
bar with these two guys while you have dinner.”
But Trump
deferred.
“I’ll leave
that to Ye. Do you want them to join?” Trump asked, according to Giorno.
“Yes,” Ye
replied. “Let’s all eat.”
“Great,”
Trump said. “Let’s go out to the patio.”
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