The Press Drags Trump’s Expected 2024 Rivals into the Conversation about His Vile Antisemite Dinner

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact-Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the press-driven effort to project Donald Trump’s dinner with Nick Fuentes onto Ron DeSantis and onto the GOP as a whole, and hit more media misses.

The Buck Never Stops with Trump

It should have been so easy. Donald Trump, the reviled former president and current candidate for the same office, had met with two of the country’s most famous bigots, Nick Fuentes and Kanye West. 

All that the mainstream media had to do was report the facts, mix in a few of Fuentes’s and West’s most odious quotes, and allow Trump to respond hysterically. It would have been a simple recipe for the press to follow, and it would have yielded a well-earned blow to Trump’s already beleaguered reputation.

Simple, yes, but not ambitious enough.

Instead of sticking to the story before their eyes, they decided to invent one, turning Trump’s shameful entertainment of hate at Mar-a-Lago into an indictment of his chief rival for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination. 

“[Former New Jersey governor] Christie criticized Trump for meeting with Fuentes/Kanye. [Ex-secretary of state] Pompeo said something about antisemitism being bad, without naming Trump,” observed the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman about the also-rans to be. “Quiet from a number of other potential 2024 R candidates, most notably the one who’s governor of the state where the dinner took place,” continued Haberman disapprovingly. 

At Bloomberg, Josh Wingrove picked up Haberman’s baton, writing that “many of Donald Trump’s potential 2024 rivals and some top Republicans have fallen silent on the former president’s dinner with a notorious white supremacist, illustrating the party’s continuing struggle to escape his grasp. . . . Those silent so far include Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy, the chamber’s likely next speaker.” 

Elsewhere, it was suggested by professional tweeter Ron Filipkowski that Fuentes had met with Trump to urge him to leave the race in order to clear the field for Ron DeSantis.

But that’s not what Fuentes said in the clip Filipkowski posted, which included several edits. Fuentes — who is reportedly advising West ahead of his own prospective bid for the White House — touted West as his preferred candidate and expressed dissatisfaction with the idea of a two-man race between Trump and DeSantis for the Republican nomination, arguing that it would represent “a huge retreat” for the white-supremacist cause.  

Moreover, an Axios article cited by Filipkowski as evidence of Fuentes’s support for DeSantis notes that “Fuentes told Trump that he would crush potential 2024 Republican rivals in a primary, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.”

Filipkowski, who made his claims on Saturday morning, is yet to issue a correction.

The broader effort to make a disturbing story about Trump into something else entirely betrays a fundamental assumption (that all major Republicans sympathize with the dregs of society) and a fundamental goal (harming Republicans’ electoral prospects). Harming Trump’s standing with the electorate is of course appealing, but Trump will only be around for so long.

And so blinkered reporters end up grasping at straws, drawing dotted, winding lines between DeSantis — against whom there are no substantiated allegations of bigotry — and the dinner (“It happened in Florida!”) and treating it as a failure of his administration that he didn’t rush to a podium to comment on it. 

It would be a surprise if DeSantis does not eventually (perhaps once he formally declares his candidacy) use Trump’s associations with bigots to his advantage. And if he were to be asked about it directly, he should be quick to condemn Fuentes’s and West’s repugnant views. Notably, he already condemned a message projected onto a Florida building earlier this month that read “Kanye is right about the Jews.” 

But, for now, he’s wise to ignore both the former president — who thrives politically on a diet of media saturation, backlash, and proclaimed victimhood — and the media as they discredit themselves.

Headline Fail of the Week

At Axios, they’re still marveling about “Sam Bankman-Fried’s ‘underdressed genius’ look,” in their headlines and, beneath them, bemoaning that female executives don’t adopt a similarly casual look.

“‘I think it’s fair to say that in the thousands of female founders we’ve met, there’s not a single one who has ever dressed like Sam Bankman-Fried,’ Nisha Dua, co-founder at BBG Ventures, an early-stage investment fund that backs women founders, told Axios recently. She was talking about Bankman-Fried’s signature disheveled look — shorts, frumpled T-shirts, mussed hair,” wrote Sarah Peck.

We refuse to concede that this is a topic worth focusing on in the broader FTX story, but isn’t Peck’s thesis contradicted by the mere existence of Bankman-Fried’s business partner, accomplice, and girlfriend Caroline Ellison?

Media Misses

— The Chinese Communist Party is building quarantine camps, welding people into their apartments, and beating starving protesters in pursuit of its zero-Covid policy, and the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz thinks this represents a more humane approach than the United States’.

— Meanwhile, Lorenz also wrote a story featuring quotes from activists and online-trust-and-safety experts who claim Elon Musk’s decision to reinstate banned Twitter accounts will turn the site into a “free-for-all hellscape.”

— Trans activist Natalee Bingham tries to resettle the narrative on the Colorado gay-bar shooting after lawyers said the suspect identifies at nonbinary: 

— And finally, MSNBC host Ayman Mohyeldin compares Qatar’s dreadful human-rights record (thousands of migrant workers are estimated to have died building the country’s World Cup infrastructure) to conservatives’ pushback against the radical reinterpretation of sex and gender currently underway in America’s classrooms.