In a press release on Friday, Mr. Trump stated: “Kanye West very a lot needed to go to Mar-a-Lago. Our dinner assembly was meant to be Kanye and me solely, however he arrived with a visitor whom I had by no means met and knew nothing about.” The assertion stated nothing about Mr. Fuentes’s views.
In a put up later Friday on his social media web site, Reality Social, Mr. Trump stated that Mr. West “unexpectedly confirmed up with three of his associates, whom I knew nothing about.” He stated the dinner passed off “with many members current on the again patio. The dinner was fast and uneventful. Then they left for the airport.”
Early Friday night, Mr. Trump made a 3rd try at defending himself, saying that Mr. West had sought enterprise recommendation from him, “expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated the entire good issues he stated about me on ‘Tucker Carlson.’ Why wouldn’t I agree to fulfill? I additionally, I didn’t know Nick Fuentes.”
Even taking at face worth Mr. Trump’s protestation that he knew nothing of Mr. Fuentes, the obvious ease with which Mr. Fuentes arrived on the house of a former president who’s below a number of investigations — together with one associated to preserving labeled paperwork at Mar-a-Lago lengthy after he left workplace — underscores the undisciplined, uncontrolled nature of Mr. Trump’s post-presidency simply 10 days into his third marketing campaign for the White Home.
A handful of Republicans, together with at the least one shut ally of Mr. Trump’s, castigated him over assembly each Mr. Fuentes and Mr. West.
“To my good friend Donald Trump, you might be higher than this,” David M. Friedman, who was Mr. Trump’s longtime chapter lawyer after which his appointee as ambassador to Israel, wrote on Twitter. “Even a social go to from an antisemite like Kanye West and human scum like Nick Fuentes is unacceptable. I urge you to throw these bums out, disavow them and relegate them to the dustbin of historical past the place they belong.”
“That is simply one other instance of an terrible lack of judgment from Donald Trump, which, mixed together with his previous poor judgments, make him an untenable common election candidate for the Republican Social gathering in 2024,” stated Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey who’s contemplating a candidacy of his personal.
