Final week, former president and 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump met with white supremacist and holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, together with rapper Ye (previously often called Kanye West), whose antisemitic feedback have lately made headlines.
The assembly took place at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence on Tuesday and was broadly reported on over Thanksgiving weekend.
Ye has posted several antisemitic comments on social media in recent months; in a single submit, he accused Jewish folks within the media of getting a shared agenda towards him, drawing upon decades-old antisemitic conspiracy theories; in one other, he accused Jewish folks of making “cancel tradition.”
Fuentes has pushed false antisemitic conspiracy theories for a number of years and has repeatedly denied that there was a Jewish Holocaust throughout World Warfare II. Fuentes, who’s standard amongst far proper activists with white nationalist viewpoints, also took part in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, by which right-wing attendees chanted anti-Jewish slogans and engaged in violence towards counterprotesters. The rally resulted in the homicide of anti-racist activist Heather Heyer.
(Three days after Heyer’s homicide, Trump defended the far proper rallygoers in Charlottesville, claiming there have been “very high quality folks on either side.”)
After information of the assembly was made public, the previous president claimed in a Truth Social post on Saturday that the gathering was a response to Ye’s request for “recommendation regarding a few of his difficulties.”
“We additionally mentioned, to a lesser extent, politics, the place I informed him he ought to positively not run for President,” Trump stated, including that the dialog was “nice” and that Ye “expressed no anti-Semitism.”
“Additionally, I didn’t know Nick Fuentes,” Trump stated. This can be a questionable declare, as Fuentes has beforehand organized events attended by right-wing lawmaker Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia).
On Sunday, Trump known as Ye a “significantly troubled man” and claimed that the rapper had introduced sudden friends to Mar-a-Lago, together with Fuentes. Trump additionally faulted the “pretend information” media for reporting on the assembly.
Though a lot of Trump’s closest allies have encouraged him to denounce the meeting, the previous president has refused to sentence Fuentes’s white supremacist views.
“Even together with his ignorance of Fuentes taken at face worth, the statements sign Trump will give extraordinary deference to probably the most fringe components of his base,” wrote The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell.
The assembly was the topic of widespread criticism on social media.
“That Trump promoted [Fuentes] by privately eating with him and Kanye West after which publicizing their time collectively reminds the world who Trump actually is and what his return to energy would portend,” stated Harvard Law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe.
Trump “all the time tries to assert he doesn’t affiliate with white nationalists, that he doesn’t know them,” former Obama administration aide Alaina Beverly stated on MSNBC. “However he’ll wink and nod in the identical breath and say ‘Proud boys, stand again and stand by.”
In October, Trump attacked Jews within the U.S. for not displaying larger assist for a lot proper leaders inside the Israeli authorities — drawing upon the antisemitic trope that American Jews are secretly loyal to Israel reasonably than the U.S., and perpetuating the fallacy that Zionism is crucial to Jewish id.
“Jewish individuals who reside in america don’t love Israel sufficient,” Trump said on Truth Social last month, including that they higher “get their act collectively…earlier than it’s too late.”
