A white nationalist and a 2024 rival: What happened at Trump’s dinner with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West?

Donald Trump once again finds himself in hot water – this time even incurring the disapproval of his fellow Republicans – for sitting down to dinner at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida, with the increasingly wayward Kanye West and the rapper’s “campaign adviser” Nick Fuentes.

Mr West, an acclaimed rapper now going by the name Ye, who recently torpedoed his music career by launching into a string of bizarre antisemitic rants on social media, causing his commercial sponsors to desert him in droves, has previously sought out Mr Trump at Trump Tower in New York City and at the White House during his presidency on a whim.

Now plotting a hopelessly unlikely presidential run in 2024 – theoretically pitching him against Mr Trump – West again sought out the one-term president and former luxury real estate magnate, this time for advice on that project.

They sat down to dinner at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday 22 November with another man in attendance, the notorious white nationalist and Holocaust-denier Mr Fuentes, whom Mr Trump has subsequently claimed not to have previously known or recognised.

Mr Fuentes is best known for picketing the annual Conservative Political Action Conference for being, as he sees it, insufficiently extreme, for launching his own rival summit and for courting such mainstream MAGA Republicans as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.

He was also recently profiled by British documentarian Louis Theroux for his Forbidden America series.

When Axios first broke the story of the dinner last week, the former president said in a statement: “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.”

In a later post on Truth Social, Mr Trump gave a further account of the evening, writing: “So I help a seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black, Ye (Kanye West), who has been decimated in his business and virtually everything else, and who has always been good to me, by allowing his request for a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, alone, so that I can give him very much needed ‘advice.’

“He shows up with 3 people, two of which I didn’t know, the other a political person who I haven’t seen in years. I told him don’t run for office, a total waste of time, can’t win. Fake News went CRAZY!”

In its original report, Axios offered more detail in the shape of quotes from an unnamed Trump insider who reported that Mr Fuentes had praised Mr Trump as an “amazing” president and assured him he would see off any future challenge from Florida governor Ron DeSantis but had told him that he appeared more “authentic” as a public speaker when he spoke off the cuff and did not use a teleprompter.

“There was a lot of fawning back and forth,” the source alleged, also suggesting that Mr Trump had taken a phone call during the meal and was noticeably less warm towards West after hanging up, criticised his ex-wife Kim Kardashian and was “perturbed” by the rapper’s suggestion that he could be his running mate, later “screaming” at his guest that he could never win an election and that there was little point trying.

For all that, Mr Trump is also alleged to have turned to West at one point and said of Mr Fuentes: “I really like this guy. He gets me.”

That line was later supported by a video West posted on his newly restored Twitter account on Thursday entitled “Mar-a-Lago debrief” in which he claimed Mr Trump had been “really impressed” with Mr Fuentes because “unlike so many of the lawyers and so many people that he was left with on his 2020 campaign, he’s actually a loyalist”.

The sitdown has since drawn unsurprising condemnation from Joe Biden and the White House, which said in a statement from deputy press secretary Andrew Bates: “Bigotry, hate, and antisemitism have absolutely no place in America – including at Mar-a-Lago.”

More damagingly in Trumpworld, criticism also came from Mr Trump’s ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and from former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who said the episode betrayed an “awful lack of judgement”.

Ex-White House chief strategist and alt-right jester Steve Bannon suggested it amounted to a “trolling operation” on the part of West and Mr Fuentes, calculated to leave Mr Trump looking “irrelevant” and “not focused” on his own presidential campaign.

Speaking to Real America’s Voice, Mr Bannon added: “The staff should know that, the staff should be on top of that, the staff should be doing interventions into this if that’s the case.”

Also highly damaging to Mr Trump’s credibility was the news that an unnamed adviser had told NBC the dinner represented “a f***ing nightmare” in public relations terms.

“If people are looking at DeSantis to run against Trump, here’s another reason why,” the staffer added with evident dismay.

The leaks have kept on coming from Mar-a-Lago, with billionaire Jeff Greene, a member of the Florida golf resort, since telling The Financial Times that the ex-president’s life is currently filled with sycophants and hangers-on but lacking in any actual friendships.

“It’s all transactional,” Mr Greene told the newspaper. “They want to be around him because he’s the ex-president. He likes people to defer to him… and tell him how good he is.”