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Former President Trump had dinner with white nationalist Nick Fuentes this week at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida, Axios reported on Friday.
Two sources told Axios that the dinner happened on Tuesday night alongside rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, who had said Trump “basically screaming at me at the table” when he asked the former president to be his running mate in 2024.
Ye alluded to the meal and Fuentes’s presence in a video posted to Twitter on Friday.
“So Trump is really 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 actually a loyalist,” Ye said in the video, titled “Mar-a-Lago debrief.”
The Justice Department has called Fuentes a white supremacist, and he is known for his racist and antisemitic rhetoric, including casting doubts on the Holocaust.
Ye, who has faced a wave of pushback for his own antisemitic comments this year, had also run for president in 2020 after visiting Trump in the Oval Office.
“Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago,” Trump told Axios in a statement. “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.”
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The Hill has reached out to representatives for Trump and Fuentes for further comment.
Trump last week formally entered the 2024 race for the White House, his third serious presidential bid.
So far, he is the only prominent Republican to enter the race to challenge President Biden, but multiple other GOP officials and members of the Trump administration, including former Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have acknowledged they may mount a challenge.
Fuentes, a prominent supporter of Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in 2020, was among the leaders of the “America First” movement subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 House committee.
He was on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, 2021, but has not been accused of entering the building during the riot. The day after insurrection, he reportedly wrote on Twitter, “The Capitol Siege was f—ing awesome and I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t.”
Far-right GOP Reps. Paul Gosar (Ariz.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) both took criticism from their own party after speaking at a March event organized by Fuentes.
