Kanye Visits Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Absolute Chaos Follows
Kanye West is going to run for president again after his failed “campaign” in 2020. What that actually means in practice is anyone’s guess, but the rapper, recently caught in a series of scandals surrounding his antisemitism, went to Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday to ask Donald Trump to be his running mate.
That went about as well as you’d expect, and now Kanye has released a “Mar-a-Lago debrief” describing what transpired. Surprisingly, the video is fairly clean and safe to play at work.
Kanye alleges that he and Nick Fuentes, another rabid anti-Semite who I’ll get to in a moment, went to Mar-a-Lago to talk to the former president. That part of this has essentially been confirmed given video evidence and first-hand accounts that they were present on the property. What was said in the meeting is murkier because Trump’s team is refusing to comment (as of this writing). That means we are left having to take the word of Kanye, who is clearly suffering from deep-seated mental illness.
In his “debrief,” the rapper claims that Trump was “really impressed with Nick Fuentes,” gushing over him being a supposed “loyalist.” Kanye then asserts that he asked the former president why he didn’t free the January 6th prisoners when he had the chance.
That’s followed by a claim that Trump went into a spill about getting convicted drug dealer Alice Johnson out of prison. You may remember Johnson as the woman who eventually became the centerpiece of Trump’s criminal justice reform push.
The video then shifts to Kanye accusing Trump of saying something untoward about Kim Kardashian, though it’s bleeped out. Things then end with the rapper accusing Trump of yelling at him over his 2024 offer, asking “has that ever worked for anybody,” indicating that the beratement wasn’t effective.
Alright, so with all of that out of the way, how much of what I just described from Kanye’s video is true? I have no idea. Again, we are dealing with a man who is mentally ill. We are also dealing with a man who is a rabid anti-Semite and is now palling around with other rabid anti-Semites like Nick Fuentes.
But that begs the question of why they were even allowed on the property. I understand some are going to call this 56D chess and offer assurances that Trump knows what he’s doing, but I don’t buy it. I think the former president’s thirst to be around famous people once again became a liability here. The easiest thing in the world would have been to tell Kanye and Fuentes to kick rocks and head back to the airport. Instead, there is now an alleged contact point between Trump and Fuentes, a racist clown who was present at the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.
Besides, Kanye himself isn’t worthy of being given the time of day either. The guy has become a disciple of anti-Semitic, far-left black nationalism that teaches black people are the “real” Hebrews. Trump should be running as far away from that garbage as he can, and he missed a golden opportunity to publicly oppose it. Instead, it’ll now be used as evidence for the next two years.
For everyone’s sake, I hope Fuentes was actually left in the parking lot and that Kanye’s claims about Trump being impressed with that five-foot-tall bigot are untrue. Still, it was a lapse in judgment to even feed into this setup at all. Kanye is not Trump’s friend. That he keeps treating him as one and being willing to give him private meetings is not helpful. A clean break has been way past due.
Ask me how much I’d like to not be writing this piece right now. Yet, the news doesn’t stop just because I don’t like it, and the internet is now ablaze with confirmation that Donald Trump had dinner with white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
Fuentes showed up on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye West (or Ye or whatever). As I shared in another recent piece, West put out a “debrief” describing his meeting with the former president, including an accusation that Trump badmouthed Kim Kardashian and praised Fuentes. Still, I was wishing that the reports of the white nationalist actually being there were false.
Unfortunately, they aren’t.
This source is wrong. Nick Fuentes in fact did have dinner with Trump and Kanye at Mar-a-Lago and spoke directly with the former president, per sources with direct knowledge. Story to come on @axios. https://t.co/1QK4j5WuQv
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) November 25, 2022
There are very few mainstream media reporters I take at their word, but Jonathan Swan is one of them. If he says this happened, it happened. Besides, we already knew that Fuentes was with Kanye that night because it was on video. I had just hoped that maybe he was left in the parking lot or something.
The failure points here are almost too plentiful to keep up with. For starters, does Trump not have any staffers around him? Did none of them see Fuentes and think “maybe we should throw up a red flag on this” in an attempt to stop this dinner from occurring? It’s one thing to sit down with Kanye, who is struggling with mental illness and has a prior relationship with the former president. It’s another to have dinner with (and allegedly praise) a freaking white supremacist who denies the Holocaust.
Secondly, Trump himself owns some responsibility. If he didn’t know who Fuentes is (which seems probable), he should have sought out that information before allowing him in. These kinds of self-inflicted wounds are mind-numbing, and if you thought Charlottesville haunted Trump, wait until the press latches onto him having dinner with one of the organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally that took place. This is going to be a disaster.
But you know what? I don’t even care about the political aspects of this as much as I care about the fact that it’s just wrong. Yeah, I voted for and supported Trump, but I’m not going to be forced to defend something I know is indefensible. This entire thing is ridiculous, and none of us, including Trump’s most hardcore supporters, have to keep putting up with it. Trump is letting us down, not the other way around.
Here’s the choice that is coming into view. You can spend the next two years fighting these stupid, self-inflicted distractions only to likely lose the general election, or you can have a real primary and explore every option. Trump did a lot of good things, but it’s not 2016 anymore. For me, the question is who is most likely to deliver the policy goals I seek because as I’ve said many times, politics is not a cult of personality. The moment a politician isn’t useful to me, they can go jump in a lake.
Trump appears ready and willing to make himself expendable, even if only out of pure ignorance, and that’s not anyone’s fault by his. These self-inflicted wounds are never going to stop, and it’s up to GOP voters to decide whether they want to keep this ride going.
UPDATE:
When you’ve lost Breitbart…
Former President Donald Trump came under fire recently after it was confirmed that he had dinner with rapper Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, a prominent white nationalist. The news elicited speculation about the matter, with people questioning whether it happened in the first place, and wondering what Trump knew and didn’t know about Fuentes.
One of the former president’s advisors must have alerted him to the potential scandal because on Friday, he took to Truth Social to address the issue. He wrote:
This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about. We had dinner on Tuesday evening with many members present on the back patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful. They then left for the airport.
This lines up with what some reported on Twitter and news outlets. Much of the speculation centered on whether Trump knew Fuentes would be present and if he knew he is a white nationalist.
The former president’s campaign also released a statement to Breitbart News:
Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago. 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.
Critics claim the Secret Service would have informed the former president of these details beforehand. But if West never informed anyone that he was bringing friends, then it is unlikely they would have known Fuentes was coming and that he is a white nationalist.
Nevertheless, the meeting was a bad look.
Trump’s contention that he knew nothing about Fuentes is believable; he is not exactly a prominent figure on the right, despite what the activist media would like us to believe. Many people have no idea who he is. However, once again, this might be another consequence of the former president’s biggest weakness: The inability to choose the right people with whom to surround himself.
This situation will provide yet another avenue for the left to attack Trump. As RedState’s Bonchie noted:
These kinds of self-inflicted wounds are mind-numbing, and if you thought Charlottesville haunted Trump, wait until the press latches onto him having dinner with one of the organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally that took place. This is going to be a disaster.
Trump’s response was probably the most effective he could have given at this moment. If he didn’t know who he was dealing with, that softens the blow slightly. But it still raises questions as to why he did not know with whom he was breaking bread.
Why weren’t his staffers on top of this? Shouldn’t they have been looking out for his best interests? This appears to be yet another example illustrating that Trump does not surround himself with the right people – and that weakness will continue to plague him as time goes on.
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