Target of frying by sectors of the Republican Party, after a lower-than-expected result in the midterms and a series of investigations that take shape against him, the former president of the United States Donald Trump found a way to raise the temperature of the oil himself.
Last week, the politician received Nick Fuentes, a notorious white supremacist, at his resort in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, at a dinner that was also attended by rapper Kanye West – who today introduces himself as Ye.
The meeting took place days after Trump presented himself as a pre-candidate for the Presidency in 2024 and saw the charges grow for the party’s poor performance in the mid-term elections – he banked inexperienced and extremist candidates, which alienated moderate voters from Republicans.
In this context, receiving an open racist and a rapper involved in controversies of the same carat in the week of Thanksgiving, one of the most important holidays in the country, only increased the pressure.
Fuentes, 24, is considered a white supremacist by the US Department of Justice itself. He was kicked out of social networks like YouTube and today uses his podcast to openly propagate anti-Semitic and racist speech — among other things, denying the Holocaust.
He participated in the racist “Unite the Right” march in Virginia in 2017, which brought together supremacists and neo-Nazis and ended with three dead. After Trump lost the election to Joe Biden in 2020, he urged supporters of the Republican to “invade the Legislature of all states by January 20”, the date on which the Democrat took office, and led protesters in the vicinity of the Capitol on January 6 January 2021, in Washington, when the building was invaded.
Critics of the former president have been quick to raise their voices in recent days. “Hanging around with an anti-Semitic, pro-Putin white supremacist is not complicated; it’s indefensible,” said Representative Liz Cheney, from the more anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party and who is on the House committee investigating the attack on Congress.
Senators also spoke out, and even a governor, Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, criticized the dinner. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for a leader, who is seen as an example by the country and the party, to meet with an outspoken racist and anti-Semite,” he told CNN. “Stay away from it.” Hutchinson is a Republican, and is preparing to give way to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, from the same party.
Even close allies raised questions, such as David M. Friedman, the politician’s lawyer and former ambassador to Israel. “To my friend Donald Trump: you are better than this,” he wrote on Twitter, calling Fuentes human scum and the meeting unacceptable. “I urge you [Trump] reject these bums and relegate them to the dustbin of history where they belong.”
Doubt grows within the party as to the former president’s ability to win a new election, while names like Ron DeSantis gain more and more strength. The re-elected governor of Florida, seen as something of a new generation of Trump, preferred to stay out of the controversy.
Another candidate, former Trump vice-president Mike Pence, did not do the same. “The president was wrong to give a seat at the table to a white nationalist, anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. I think he should apologize.”
The politician even tried to distance himself and wrote on a social network that he did not know Fuentes. “Kanye West called me for dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly after, he showed up unexpectedly with three friends I knew nothing about,” he said. “We had dinner on Thursday night with a lot of people on the patio. Dinner was quick and unimportant. Then they went to the airport.”
The issue here is that, in addition to Fuentes, Ye is accused of racism and anti-Semitism – and his approach to the former president also bothers the centrist wing of the party.
The rapper launched himself as a pre-candidate for the Presidency last week and said that he went to Mar-a-Lago to ask that Trump be his vice-president – which, according to the musician himself, was rejected out of hand. “Trump basically started yelling at me and saying I was going to lose. Has that ever worked for anyone in history?” he said, in a video posted on Twitter and later deleted. “I said, ‘Easy, easy, easy, easy, easy, Trump. You’re talking to Ye’.”
The opposition took advantage of the dinner cues. Biden, questioned over the weekend about the case, was curt: “You don’t want to hear what I think about this.” This Monday (28), White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said that “there is no place for these kinds of vile forces in society” and that not speaking out against racism “is also incredibly dangerous”.
The case crowns a new low point for Trump, who has seen an old sexual assault allegation return to the news. On the same day that a law went into effect in New York that allows victims of such crimes to sue their abusers even if the episode happened a long time ago, journalist E. Jean Carroll filed a lawsuit against Trump for defamation and assault.
The rape would have occurred in 1995, and she had already sued the former president for defamation in 2019. He denies the accusations.
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