The narrative of GOP silence in response to Trump’s appalling meeting was premature.
The narrative of GOP silence in response to the appalling meeting was premature.
B y Sunday night, the news that Donald Trump had dinner with notorious antisemites Kanye West and Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago had developed into a story about how Republicans had failed to condemn the meeting.
The narrative seemed a bit premature. News of the dinner broke the night before Thanksgiving; initial reports conflicted about whether the Holocaust denier Fuentes was at the dinner; and many people, including elected officials and staffers, are traveling and not working over the Thanksgiving break.
By Monday night, sure enough, the narrative of GOP silence had been overtaken by statements of more than a dozen prominent Republicans who condemned the meeting.
Georgia Republican governor Brian Kemp, fresh off a resounding reelection victory, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Racism, antisemitism and denial of the Holocaust have no place in the Republican Party and are completely un-American.”
“President Trump hosting racist antisemites for dinner encourages other racist antisemites,” Louisiana GOP senator Bill Cassidy wrote on Twitter on Monday. “These attitudes are immoral and should not be entertained. This is not the Republican Party.”
Former vice president Mike Pence said in a NewsNation interview: “President Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, an anti-Semite, and a Holocaust denier, a seat at the table and I think he should apologize for it. And he should denounce those individuals and their hateful rhetoric without qualification.”
Florida’s senior GOP senator Marco Rubio told reporters in the Capitol on Monday that Fuentes is an “evil . . . a**clown” who was “legitimized” by Trump’s meeting.
“There’s no room in the Republican Party for white supremacists and antisemitism, so it’s wrong,” Florida’s junior GOP senator Rick Scott said. “I think Republicans should all condemn white supremacy and antisemitism.”
Utah GOP senator Mitt Romney said: “There’s no bottom to the degree which he’s willing to degrade himself and the country for that matter. Having dinner with those people was disgusting.”
Montana GOP senator Steve Daines said: “We cannot tolerate antisemitism. Period.”
Maine GOP senator Susan Collins said: “I condemn white supremacy and antisemitism. The president should never have had a meal or even a meeting with Nick Fuentes.”
On Sunday, Nebraska GOP congressman Don Bacon told reporters: “I am appalled.”
Arkansas GOP governor Asa Hutchinson told CNN on Sunday: “This was not an accidental meeting. It was a set-up dinner with Kanye. . . . You have to disavow it. It is as simple as that.”
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said: “This is just another example of an awful lack of judgment from Donald Trump.”
The blowback to Trump really isn’t overstated on this matter. As I reported in June 2021:
The media and the Left frequently cry wolf about bigotry, but there should be no doubt about Fuentes. He once called a writer a “race traitor” because he “work[s] for Jews.” He opposes interracial marriage and has praised segregation.
“Enough with the Jim Crow stuff. Who cares? Oh, they had to drink out of a different water fountain, big f***ing deal. Oh no, they had to go to a different school,” Fuentes said in one video. “It’s better for them, it’s better for us.”
“I’m getting really sick of world Jewry — that’s what it is! what it is! — running the show, and we can’t talk about it,” he said in another video.
In yet another video, he joyfully promoted grotesque claims denying that millions of Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Smirking and laughing, he read a question from a viewer who was obviously comparing murdered Jews to cookies and Adolph Hitler to Cookie Monster: “If I take one hour to cook a batch of cookies, and Cookie Monster has fifteen hours working every day for five years, how long does it take Cookie Monster to make six million batches of cookies?”
“The math doesn’t seem to add up there,” Fuentes says. “Maybe two-hundred to three-hundred thousand cookies,” he adds before making several more references to bits of propaganda cited by Holocaust deniers.
Fuentes attended the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. The night before the rally, white nationalists and neo-Nazis carrying torches chanted “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” During the rally itself, a white-nationalist terrorist murdered a counterprotester named Heather Heyer with his car.
Hours after the terrorist attack had occurred, Fuentes wrote on Facebook that the Unite the Right rally was “incredible.” “You will not replace us,” he said. “The rootless transnational elite knows that a tidal wave of white identity is coming.”
Trump now claims that he didn’t know who Fuentes was, but it’s implausible that none of his staff did. Moreover, Trump still refuses to condemn the Holocaust denier, and he invited Kanye West to dinner after West spent the past two months making deranged, antisemitic outbursts in public. Trump’s dinner with West and Fuentes is no different from hosting Louis Farrakhan and David Duke for dinner.