Report: Trump Doesn’t Want to Condemn His Holocaust-Denying Dinner Date Because It Might Alienate His Jew-Hating Supporters

By now you’ve likely heard the news that on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Donald Trump had a dinner date at Mar-a-Lago with two gigantic antisemites. One of those antisemites was the artist formerly known as Kanye West, who now goes by “Ye” and who has recently been in the news for threatening to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” with a former TMZ employee also claiming last month that in an unaired interview segment, West previously declared that he “loved Hitler and the Nazis.” The other was Nick Fuentes, a 24-year-old who The New York Times describes as “one of the country’s most prominent young white supremacists.” Fuentes’s virulently antisemitic and unabashedly racist statements are too numerous to list in full, so we’ll just throw out here that he:

• Denies that the Holocaust happened
• Likened Jews burning in gas chambers to baking cookies
• Attended the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us”
• Claimed that “whites are under attack”
• Insisted that segregation was a good thing and that Black people were too sensitive about the extremely racist Jim Crow laws, saying: ”Oh no, they had to go to different schools. Their water fountain in that famous picture was worse. Who cares? Grow up, drink out of the fucking water fountain. It’s water, it’s the same. Even [if] it was bad, who cares? We all agree, it’s better for them, it’s better for us. It’s better in general.”
• Said he was against “mixed marriages”
• Declared that white people colonizing “the earth” and enslaving Black people was “epic and demonstrative of how smart and powerful we are”
• Recently called for the military to be sent into “these Black neighborhoods”
• Recently, per the Times, demanded “that Jews leave the country”

Not surprisingly, Fuentes also seems to hate women and has said we need to go back to “burning [them] alive.” Naturally, at a “Stop the Steal” rally in November 2020, he told his followers to “storm every state capitol until January 20, 2021, until President Trump is inaugurated for four more years.” On January 6, 2021, he led a group to rally outside the Capitol, later tweeting that the insurrection was “awesome and I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t.”

Anyway, people who are not hateful bigots (or fascists or misogynists or generally awful excuses for human beings) can understand why it wasn’t a great look for a guy currently hoping to win a second term running the country to dine with these two men. But Trump is a hateful bigot with his own documented history of horribly racist and antisemitic commentary. Moreover, he knows a large chunk of his base is made up of people who love his horribly racist and antisemitic commentary, and that said commentary is the exact reason they have previously voted for him. Which is why, in a turn of events that should shock exactly no one, he’s spent nearly a week refusing to denounce either of his dining companions.

In a statement on Friday, he 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.” Later that day, on Truth Social, he wrote that West “unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about,” adding that “the dinner was quick and uneventful.” That night, giving it a third go, he wrote that West had asked him for business advice, “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? Also, I didn’t know Nick Fuentes.”

Trump, of course, is trying to give himself some cover here by insisting Fuentes just randomly showed up and that he had no idea who he was. But even if we choose to believe that he knew nothing of the guy prior to breaking bread with him, he has no doubt been made acutely aware of exactly who Fuentes is and what he represents in the days since—and he still won’t say anything even mildly critical about the guy. That was already evident based on his criticism-free statements, but just to put a fine point on it, The Guardian reported Monday that, according to two people familiar with the matter, Trump has “repeatedly refused to disavow” Fuentes, “rejecting the advice from advisers over fears he might alienate a section of his base.” According to the outlet, advisers had reached out to him over Thanksgiving, but Trump “ultimately made clear that he fundamentally did not want to criticize Fuentes…and became more entrenched in his obstinance the more he was urged to do so.”

Trump’s 2024 campaign responded to The Guardian’s request for comment by insisting that the ex-president had a strong record of combating antisemitism and strengthening US ties to Israel. It did not mention how he recently ranted about Jews needing to “get their act together…Before it is too late,” or how he reportedly told his chief of staff that “Hitler did a lot of good things,” or how he infamously said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a rally that included participation by neo-Nazis. Among many other things.