Former President Trump is being heavily criticized for hosting dinner at his Mar-a-Lago Florida estate with rapper Kanye West, also known as Ye, and white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
Ye posted a video to Twitter acknowledging the dinner with Trump and Fuentes, who is widely known for making antisemitic comments and casting doubts on the Holocaust.
“So Trump is impressed with Nick Fuentes, and Nick Fuentes, unlike so many of the lawyers, and so many of the people that he was left with on his 2020 campaign, he’s a loyalist,” Ye said in the video.
In response, Trump defended the meal saying that he invited Ye but didn’t know that he was going to bring Fuentes along.
“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 to Axios, adding that he didn’t know Fuentes before the dinner.
Meanwhile, Trump’s inner circle is criticizing the former president, calling it “unacceptable.”
“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,” David Friedman, who served as Trump’s U.S. Ambassador to Israel said.
"I condemned Barack Obama associating with Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright," Friedman continued, adding "this is no different. Antisemites deserve no quarter among American leaders, right or left.”
“Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was asking me for advice concerning some of his difficulties, in particular having to do with his business. We also discussed, to a lesser extent, politics, where I told him he should not run for President, ‘any voters you may have should vote for TRUMP,’” Trump said of the meeting, “anyway, we got along great, he 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?”