Donald Trump announced his plans to seek re-election in 2024 in mid-November.
Washington:
The White House on Saturday condemned former President Donald Trump for meeting at his Florida estate with a known white supremacist and rapper Kanye West who has been embroiled in a storm over anti-Semitic remarks.
Trump acknowledged dining with West, now known as Ye, at Mar-a-Lago Tuesday night, saying he brought friends, including Nick Fuentes, an outspoken anti-Semite and racist.
“I didn’t know Nick Fuentes,” Trump posted on his Truth Social account late Friday.
Andrews Bates, deputy White House press secretary, condemned Trump’s meeting with Fuentes.
“Intolerance, hatred and anti-Semitism have absolutely no place in America — not even in Mar-a-Lago. Holocaust denial is abhorrent and dangerous, and it must be strongly condemned,” Bates told NewsMadura.
President Joe Biden, who is spending the holiday weekend in Nantucket, dodged a question about Trump’s dinner: “You don’t want to hear what I think.”
Fuentes is a Holocaust denier whose YouTube channel was permanently suspended in early 2020 for violating the platform’s hate speech policy.
Trump announced his plans to seek re-election in 2024 in mid-November, and his embrace of a white nationalist upset some of his former administration officials.
David Friedman, who was Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, destroyed the dinner at Mar-a-Lago.
“Even a social visitation from an anti-Semite like Kanye West and human scum like Nick Fuentes is unacceptable,” Friedman said in one of the tweets.
“Anti-Semites deserve no place among American leaders, right or left,” he said.
Axios, a news website, quoted a source familiar with the dinner as saying that Trump seemed “very taken” with Fuentes, although he seemed to know nothing about his background.
West, now legally known as Ye, has lost major brand partnerships with German sportswear company Adidas and US retailer Gap over recent anti-Semitic statements and associations with extremists.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NewsMadura staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)
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