Trump’s Latest Dinner Guest: Nick Fuentes, White
Supremacist
The former president’s table for four at Mar-a-Lago on
Tuesday also included Kanye West, whose antisemitic statements have made him an
entertainment-industry outcast.
By Maggie
Haberman and Alan Feuer
Nov. 25,
2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/25/us/politics/trump-nick-fuentes-dinner.html?searchResultPosition=1
Former
President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night had dinner with Nick Fuentes, an
outspoken antisemite and racist who is one of the country’s most prominent young
white supremacists, at Mr. Trump’s private club in Florida, advisers to Mr.
Trump conceded on Friday.
Also at the
dinner was the performer Kanye West, who has also been denounced for making
antisemitic statements. Mr. West traveled to meet with Mr. Trump at the club,
Mar-a-Lago, and brought Mr. Fuentes along, the advisers said.
The fourth
attendee at the four-person dinner, Karen Giorno — a veteran political
operative who worked on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign as his state director in
Florida — also confirmed that Mr. Fuentes was there. Attempts to reach Mr.
Fuentes through an intermediary on Friday were unsuccessful.
In recent
years, Mr. Fuentes, 24, has developed a high profile on the far right and
forged ties with such Republican lawmakers as Representative Marjorie Taylor
Greene of Georgia and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, largely through his
leadership of an annual white-supremacist event called the America First
Political Action Conference.
A Holocaust
denier and unabashed racist, Mr. Fuentes openly uses hateful language on his
podcast, in recent weeks calling for the military to be sent into Black
neighborhoods and demanding that Jews leave the country.
It is
unclear how much Mr. Trump knew of Mr. Fuentes’s well-documented bigotry and extremism
before their dinner.
Citing
people close to Mr. Trump, some earlier news coverage of Mr. West’s visit to
Mar-a-Lago had falsely reported that Mr. Fuentes did not attend the dinner.
During the
dinner, according to a person briefed on what took place, Mr. Fuentes described
himself as part of Mr. Trump’s base of supporters. Mr. Trump remarked that his
advisers urge him to read speeches using a teleprompter and don’t like when he
ad-libs remarks.
Mr. Fuentes
said Mr. Trump’s supporters preferred the ad-libs, at which Mr. Trump turned to
the others, the person said, and declared that he liked Mr. Fuentes, adding:
“He gets me.”
In a
statement on Friday, Mr. Trump said: “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.” The
statement said nothing about Mr. Fuentes’s views.
In a post
later Friday on his social media website, Truth Social, Mr. Trump said that Mr.
West “unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing
about.” He said the dinner took place “with many members present on the back
patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful. Then they left for the airport.”
Early
Friday evening, Mr. Trump made a third attempt at defending himself, saying
that Mr. West had sought business advice from him, “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? I also, I didn’t know Nick Fuentes.”
Even taking
at face value Mr. Trump’s protestation that he knew nothing of Mr. Fuentes, the
apparent ease with which Mr. Fuentes arrived at the home of a former president
who is under multiple investigations — including one related to keeping
classified documents at Mar-a-Lago long after he left office — underscores the
undisciplined, uncontrolled nature of Mr. Trump’s post-presidency just 10 days
into his third campaign for the White House.
A handful
of Republicans, including at least one close ally of Mr. Trump’s, castigated
him over meeting both Mr. Fuentes and Mr. West.
“To my
friend Donald Trump, you are better than this,” David M. Friedman, who was Mr.
Trump’s longtime bankruptcy lawyer and then his appointee as ambassador to
Israel, wrote on Twitter. “Even a social visit from an antisemite like Kanye
West and human scum like Nick Fuentes is unacceptable. I urge you to throw
those bums out, disavow them and relegate them to the dustbin of history where
they belong.”
“This is
just another example of an awful lack of judgment from Donald Trump, which,
combined with his past poor judgments, make him an untenable general election
candidate for the Republican Party in 2024,” said Chris Christie, a former
governor of New Jersey who is considering a candidacy of his own.
In a
statement that did not name Mr. Trump but was issued in response to the Fuentes
dinner, Matt Brooks, chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said,
“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.”
Jonathan
Greenblatt, the C.E.O. of the Anti-Defamation League, condemned Mr. Trump’s
meeting with Mr. Fuentes.
“Nick
Fuentes is among the most prominent and unapologetic antisemites in the
country,” Mr. Greenblatt said in a brief interview. “He’s a vicious bigot and
known Holocaust denier who has been condemned by leading figures from both
political parties here, including the R.J.C.”
Mr.
Greenblatt added that the idea that Mr. Trump “or any serious contender for
higher office would meet with him and validate him by sharing a meal and
spending time is appalling. And really, you can’t say that you oppose hate and
break bread with haters. It’s that simple.”
Mr.
Fuentes, who attended the bloody far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in
2017, is best known for running a white nationalist youth organization known as
America First, whose adherents call themselves groypers or the Groyper Army. In
the wake of Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020, Mr. Fuentes and the groypers were
involved in a series of public events supporting the former president.
At a
so-called “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington in November 2020, Mr. Fuentes
urged his followers to “storm every state capitol until Jan. 20, 2021, until
President Trump is inaugurated for four more years.” The following month, at a
similar event, Mr. Fuentes led a crowd in chanting “Destroy the G.O.P.,” and
urged people not to vote in the January 2021 Georgia Senate runoff elections.
On Jan. 6,
2021, Mr. Fuentes led a large group of groypers to the Capitol where they rallied
outside in support of Mr. Trump. The next day, Mr. Fuentes wrote on Twitter
that the assault on the Capitol was “awesome and I’m not going to pretend it
wasn’t.”
At least
seven people with connections to his America First organization have been charged
with federal crimes in connection with the Capitol attack. In January, Mr.
Fuentes was issued a subpoena by the House select committee investigating the
Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol seeking information about his role in it.
Mr.
Christie speculated that hosting Mr. West and Mr. Fuentes served a desire
particular to Mr. Trump: “He can’t stand not having attention all the time,”
Mr. Christie said. “And so, having someone show up at his club — even if you
believe that he didn’t know who Nick Fuentes was — and want to sit with him,
feeds the hunger he feels for the attention he’s missing since he left the
presidency.”
Mr. West,
who ran for president in 2020 and has said he will run again in 2024, posted on
Twitter a video in which he described the dinner. He claimed that Mr. Trump was
“really impressed” with Mr. Fuentes.
Mr. West
also said that he asked Mr. Trump to serve as his running mate and claimed that
Mr. Trump spoke derogatorily about Mr. West’s ex-wife, Kim Kardashian.
Maggie
Haberman is a White House correspondent. She joined The Times in 2015 as a
campaign correspondent and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018
for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia.
@maggieNYT
Alan Feuer
covers extremism and political violence. He joined The Times in 1999. @alanfeuer
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