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Former President Donald Trump elaborated on having dinner this week with controversial hip-hop megastar Kanye West and white nationalist Nick Fuentes at Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in South Florida.
"Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was asking me for advice concerning some of his difficulties, in particular having to do with his business," Trump wrote Friday in a Truth Social post regarding the Tuesday night dinner.
"We also discussed, to a lesser extent, politics, where I told him he should definitely not run for President," Trump continued. "Anyway, we got along great, he expressed no anti-Semitism [and] I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on 'Tucker Carlson.'
"Also, I didn't know Nick Fuentes," Trump added.
Fuentes, who hosts the "America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes" livestream show came to notoriety in 2017, when he attended the deadly, white nationalist "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
The ADL reports that viewers of his show are called "Groypers" or the "Groyper Army," a group that considers "their bigoted views as necessary to preserve white, European-American identity and culture."
During a 2019 livestream, Fuentes likened the atrocities committed during the Holocaust to baking cookies in an oven and claimed that the number of Jewish people killed during the mass genocide don't "seem to add up."
Both the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) have published articles speaking out against Fuentes and the hateful rhetoric he's spread publicly over the last half-decade.
"Fuentes seeks to carve out a space that deliberately and publicly challenges the mainstream conservative movement while doubling down on themes central to the white supremacist movement," the ADL website reads.
"Nick Fuentes is a white nationalist livestreamer who advocates pulling the Republican Party further to the extreme far-right end of the political spectrum," the SPLC website reads.
Fuentes and West, whose recent string of anti-Black and antisemitic remarks triggered a maelstrom of social media bans and dropped sponsorships, were seen together at the airport in Miami on Tuesday.
The same day, West tweeted that he met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and that he had asked the former president to be his running mate for a presidential bid in 2024.
On Thursday, West posted a 1:51-long video on his Twitter account, debriefing his visit to Trump's resort home.
During the video, West says "the thing that Trump was most perturbed about" was "me asking him to be my vice president."
He said Trump screamed at him that he was going to lose the presidential election in 2024, as they both did in 2020. West also said that Trump was "really impressed" by Fuentes during the dinner.
"Nick Fuentes, unlike so many of the lawyers of so many people that he was left with on his 2020 campaign, he's actually a loyalist," West said. "When he didn't know where the lawyers is [sic], you'll still have your loyalists."
In a separate Truth Social post earlier Friday, Trump issued a differing account of events, asserting that he "knew nothing about" Fuentes or the other guests who accompanied West to Mar-a-Lago.
"This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago," Trump wrote. "Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends.
"We had dinner on Tuesday evening with many members present on the back patio," Trump continued. "The dinner was quick and uneventful. They then left for the airport."
Newsweek has reached out to Trump representatives for comment.
About the writer
Taylor McCloud is a Newsweek staff writer based in California. His focus is reporting on trending and viral topics. Taylor ... Read more