Trump reportedly dines with white nationalist at Mar-a-Lago / Kanye West announces 2024 presidential bid amid far-right ties

 

Trump reportedly dines with white nationalist at Mar-a-Lago

 

Ex-president ‘dined and conversed’ with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West a week after announcing his 2024 campaign

 

Victoria Bekiempis

Fri 25 Nov 2022 21.01 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/25/trump-nick-fuentes-kanye-west

 

Donald Trump reportedly “dined and conversed” with infamous white nationalist Nick Fuentes at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach on Tuesday.

 

Trump’s encounter with the openly racist Fuentes – who was in the company of disgraced rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye – came one week after the former US president declared his 2024 campaign.

 

The interaction has prompted concerns about Trump’s willingness to engage with far-right extremists.

 

News website Axios first reported on the trio’s confab emerged hours after Ye posted a video titled “Mar-a-Lago Debrief” to his Twitter account Thursday evening, which was recently restored following suspension for making antisemitic statements.

 

Ye – who has been dropped by brands such as Balenciaga and Gap over his bigoted comments – announced his own bid for president in this video missive. But in the video he then also claimed to describe meeting with Trump in the company of Fuentes.

 

“Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes and 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,” Ye said.

 

Fuentes, who has espoused vehemently antisemitic, racist and misogynistic views, launched a white nationalist organization named America First Foundation.

 

He first received national attention in 2017 after claiming to have left Boston University over “threats” following his attendance at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

 

Trump confirmed the meeting on his social media platform, Politico reported. “This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago … 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.”

 

In a statement reported by Axios, Trump appeared to try distancing himself from Fuentes, saying: “Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago. Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about.”

 

Trump has long been criticized for his embrace of far-right figureheads. He refused to condemn white supremacists and other far-right groups during the first 2020 presidential debate, instead telling the Proud Boys extremist group to “stand back and stand by”.

 

In 2017 Trump was widely condemned for saying they were “very fine people on both sides” after clashes at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, left one anti-fascist protester dead.

 

The Southern Poverty Law Center reported in March 2020 that white nationalist hate groups increased 55% during the Trump era, saying that the surge stemmed from “a deep fear of demographic change”.

 

Kanye West announces 2024 presidential bid amid far-right ties

 

Declaration comes amid Adidas investigation and fashion brands dropping the rapper over antisemitic comments

 

Edward Helmore in New York

Fri 25 Nov 2022 15.40 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/nov/25/kanye-west-presidential-run-2024

 

The disgraced rapper and designer formerly known as Kanye West has said he plans to run for president in 2024, amid a series of antisemitic tirades and new far-right associations.

 

The declaration of his candidacy, which referenced several political figures and aides associated with US white supremacist and anti-democracy movements, would make him the second person to enter the race after Donald Trump.

 

A day earlier, the sportswear giant Adidas announced it was launching an investigation into allegations he harassed former employees. Rolling Stone magazine reported claims by Adidas employees working on the rapper’s Yeezy shoe line that he used “porn, bullying and mind games” to create a “toxic environment” at the company.

 

That revelation itself followed several fashion brands, including Adidas, Gap and Balenciaga, dropping the 45-year-old star over antisemitic comments he made online, including that he would go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE”.

 

That comment, after he wore a controversial “White Lives Matter” T-shirt during Paris fashion week, triggered mass condemnation of the rapper, and he was dropped by banker JPMorgan, his talent agent CAA, lawyers and record company. Ye later said he had lost “$2bn in one day”.

 

Twitter and Instagram temporarily locked his accounts. Ye went on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight and made further inflammatory comments, this time about his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, and the pop star Lizzo. He told former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo that his antisemitic comment was “not hate speech; this is the truth”.

 

Ye’s faltering effort to distance himself from the remarks were further undermined when antisemitic demonstrators referenced Ye in signs raised over the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, California, and in Jacksonville, Florida. One sign reportedly read: “Kanye is right about the Jews.”

 

“This weekend’s antisemitic protests in LA were disgusting and cannot be normalized or brushed aside. Words matter”, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said in a tweet.

 

The presidential run is Ye’s second. During his first, in 2020, he qualified for ballot access in just 12 states, unsuccessfully sued for access to five more, gave up on four and missed registration deadlines on a further 29.

 

He held one highly emotional rally in South Carolina in which he spoke of his anti-abortion views, funded two television ads and ultimately picked up just 70,000 votes across the entire US.

 

Ye’s announcement of a second run for the White House was made with a video of his campaign logo to social media captioned “Ye24”. In it, he claimed to have asked Donald Trump to be his running mate, a suggestion that had “most perturbed” the former president.

 

“The thing that Trump was most perturbed about [is] me asking him to be my vice-president,” Kanye said in a video posted on his recently unlocked Twitter account. “I think that was, like, lower on the list of things that caught him off-guard.”

 

“It was the fact that I walked in with intelligence,” Ye added.

 

In the “Ye24” Twitter post, the rapper said he’d he advised Trump to “go and get these people that the media tried to cancel”, with flashes of Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Roger Stone and InfoWars conspiracist Alex Jones.

 

Several days ago, Ye was seen in the company of white nationalist Nick Fuentes at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago country club and home. In the subsequent video, titled “Mar-A-Lago Debrief”, Ye said Trump “started basically screaming at me at the table, telling me I’m going to lose. Has that ever worked for anyone in history? I’m like, ‘Wait, hold on Trump, you’re talking to Ye.’”

 

Fuentes is known for virulently antisemitic opinions of his own, as well as extreme racism, misogyny and fascism. He started a white nationalist organization called America First Foundation. The Department of Justice has called him a white supremacist and he has been banned from multiple social media platforms.

 

In the video Ye sang Fuentes’s praises and called him a “loyalist”.

 

Ye also recently told the far-right British commentator Milo Yiannopoulos that he was “working on the campaign”, which Yiannopoulos said he took to be a campaign announcement. On Thursday, Ye indicated that he had enlisted Yiannopoulos as his 2024 campaign manager.

 

Yiannopoulos has a long history of antisemitism, too, including donating $14.88 to a Jewish journalist, a figure that references the so-called “14 Words” white supremacist manifesto and 88, used by neo-Nazis as shorthand for “Heil Hitler” because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.