Donald Trump’s reckless dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes should be treated as a preview of what to expect were he to be given a second term. That is, what it would be like to have a Trump who is totally left to his own devices, with even fewer reasonable advisers around to try and contain his worst impulses.
Even the most charitable interpretation of what went on at Mar-a-Lago — he only invited Kanye West and had no idea who Fuentes was — isn’t a particularly strong defense. If you invite the man who is probably, at the moment, the most famous antisemite in the world to dinner, you shouldn’t be shocked if he shows up with a Holocaust denier.
The less said about Fuentes the better. He is a whiny loser who is desperate for attention, which he can only get by saying outrageous things. And the publicity surrounding his dinner with Trump — even negative — gives him exactly what he wants, which is more attention. More people Googling his name, more reporters writing about him, and more people watching his videos. It’s unclear if Fuentes is even serious — whenever one of his videos pops up in my Twitter feed, he seems to be trying to restrain himself from smirking. But clearly some of his followers take him seriously. And he will gain more of them thanks to Trump elevating him.
Whether or not Trump is lying about not knowing who Fuentes is, the reality is that you can’t typically just walk off the street and have dinner with a former president/current presidential candidate. What this dinner tells us is that there is no responsible party in Trump’s orbit who can talk him out of having a Jew-hating celebrity to dinner, and no team in place to vet potential dinner guests to prevent giving attention to Holocaust deniers.
There are Republican voters who look at Trump’s first term and see chaos and drama, but also accomplishments — and they may be thinking of backing him to be the nominee again, assuming a second term would be roughly the same. But the fact that the Kanye-Fuentes dinner transpired is a further indication that a second Trump term wouldn’t be the same as his first, but something much worse — with even more chaos and drama, and fewer real accomplishments.