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.
David wrote: "To my friend Donald Trump, you are better than this. 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. 1/I condemned Barak Obama associating with Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright. This is no different. Antisemites deserve no quarter among American leaders, right or left."
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.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.
Trump's direct engagement with a man labeled a "white supremacist" by the Justice Department, one week after declaring his 2024 candidacy, is likely to draw renewed outrage over the former president's embrace of extremists.
Fuentes, who frequently promotes racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, had been spotted with Ye at Mar-a-Lago, but reports erroneously suggested he did not have dinner with the former president.
What they're 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 said in a statement.
A Trump spokesman did not provide comment on additional reporting about the dinner. Fuentes did not immediately respond to requests for comment.A source familiar with the dinner conversation told Axios that Trump "seemed very taken" with Fuentes, impressed that the 24-year-old was able to rattle off statistics and recall speeches dating back to his 2016 campaign.
Paraphrasing the conversation, the source said Fuentes told the president he preferred him to be "authentic," and that Trump seemed scripted and unlike himself during his recent 2024 campaign announcement speech.
Trump responded, “You like it better when I just speak off the cuff," the source said. Fuentes replied that he did, calling Trump an "amazing" president when he was unrestrained. "There was a lot of fawning back and forth," the source added.
Fuentes told Trump that he represented a side of Trump's base that was disappointed with his newly cautious approach, especially with what some far-right activists view as a lack of support for those charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Trump didn't disagree with Fuentes, but said he has advisers who want him to read off teleprompters and be more "presidential." Notably, Trump referred to himself as a politician, which he has been loathe to do in the past.
Fuentes also told Trump that he would crush potential 2024 Republican rivals in a primary, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Trump asked for Fuentes' opinion on other candidates as well.
Trump at one point turned to Ye and said, "I really like this guy. He gets me," according to the source.
"To be honest, I don't believe the president knew who the hell [Fuentes] was," the source added.
Trump asked if Fuentes was on social media such as Truth Social, the former president's alternative to Twitter.
Fuentes told Trump that he was on Truth Social but had been banned from the social media platform Gettr because Trump adviser Jason Miller, the CEO of the company, wasn't a fan of his.
Trump asked whether it was because Fuentes was on the "fringe" of his supporter base, the source said. Fuentes acknowledged that he was, saying he's "one of those people who got banned from everything."
Driving the news: Ye, whose Twitter account was recently restored after being restricted for anti-Semitic comments, posted a video on Thursday night titled "Mar-a-Lago debrief."
Ye claims in the video that Trump was "really impressed" with Fuentes because "unlike so many of the lawyers and so many people that he was left with on his 2020 campaign, he's actually a loyalist."
A source familiar with the conversation told Axios Trump took a phone call during the dinner, and his demeanor toward Ye seemed to change when he got off the call. Trump made some nasty comments about Ye's ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, and told the rapper to pass them on.
Ye, who has lost major sponsorships over his anti-Semitism and recent far-right associations, has said he wants to run for president in 2024. The rapper claims Trump started "screaming" at him at the dinner and told him he would lose — "most perturbed" by Ye asking Trump to be his running mate.
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