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ASPartOfMe
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25 Nov 2022, 5:21 pm

Trump team does damage control after he dines with Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes

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Former President Donald Trump distanced himself Friday from a pre-Thanksgiving dinner at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, claiming he didn’t know the identity of the far-right activist who was unexpectedly brought along with the rapper.

“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,” Trump said Friday in a statement on his Truth Social platform.

“We had dinner on Tuesday evening with many members present on the back patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful,” Trump said. “They then left for the airport.”

A person familiar with the dinner conversation who is not involved in Trump's presidential campaign and two Trump advisers briefed on the dinner corroborated Trump's claim that he didn't know Fuentes' identity when they dined together. The three sources spoke on condition on anonymity due to the nature of the controversy.

But despite Trump’s suggestion the event was “uneventful,” the fallout over his dinner with Fuentes appears to have thrown Trump’s campaign into damage control mode. The former president took hours to respond publicly after multiple media outlets reported that Fuentes was present at the dinner.

Even the two Trump advisers winced at how a Holocaust denier like Fuentes was able to wind up with Trump at dinner — even if it was by mistake — along with the rapper, who had just had his Twitter account restored but lost major endorsement deals for making anti-Semitic remarks.

This is a f---ing nightmare," said one longtime Trump adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of stoking the former president's ire at "disloyal" people who criticize him. "If people are looking at [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis to run against Trump, here's another reason why."

All three sources familiar with the dinner told NBC News there was one glaring inaccuracy in Trump’s statement: Trump knew one of the three “friends” brought by the rapper, Karen Giorno. She was the Trump campaign's Florida director in 2016 and the former president knows her by name and sight, the sources said. In addition to Giorno and Fuentes, Ye also brought along another man who was an associate, according to the sources.

The source familiar with the dinner conversation said the dinner grew heated after Ye — who announced another run for president in 2024 on Thursday — asked Trump to be his running mate. Trump then began insulting Ye’s ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, according to the source and a video that Ye posted to Twitter on Thanksgiving Day recounting the dinner.

The source also said Fuentes is helping advise Ye in his second presidential campaign. The rapper has said the campaign would be managed by Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-right provocateur and former Breitbart editor who was banned in 2016 for inciting a racist campaign against comedian Leslie Jones.

Ye, Fuentes and Yiannopoulos declined to comment on the dinner.

The porous nature of Mar-a-Lago, where anyone with connections can run into Trump, has long been a concern of his advisers


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25 Nov 2022, 6:26 pm

Yes. Ye reported at length about how Trump screamed at Ye (and referred to his ex Kim Kardashian by some blanked out obscenity).

BUT...on the one issue ...not sure I blame Trump for screaming.

Imagine you have served a term as POTUS, and you have already announced running for a second term, and imagine you're approached by a friend and associate who has never served in any public office at all. And imagine that this friend asks YOU to be HIS second fiddle in your friend's own presidential campaign?

Talk about chutzpah (on Kanye's part).

Thats what Kanye asked of Trump.

Maybe its just me that finds that galling.

Kinda like if Chuck Norris were to ask Ronald Reagan to not run for a second term, but to "be my vice president", or Taylor Swift asking that of Obama (just pairing random non politician celebs with the most revered recent presidents of each party). Both Reagan and Obama would be rather gobsmacked to say the least I would guess.

So now we know what happens when irresistible force of Kanye's ego meets the immovable object of Trump's ego. A lotsa psychotic screaming at Mar-a-lago happens.



ASPartOfMe
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29 Nov 2022, 8:30 pm

The inside story of Trump’s explosive dinner with Ye and Nick Fuentes

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Just two days before Thanksgiving, Donald Trump was planning to have a private, uneventful dinner with an old friend: Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West.

The two had arranged to break bread Tuesday night at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida after weeks of private phone conversations as Ye lost lucrative partnerships and became a mainstream cultural pariah for his antisemitic remarks, according to those familiar with the talks between the two men.

But Trump may have been walking into a trap in Mar-a-Lago’s gilded halls — one that leveraged his own penchant for spectacle and showmanship against him. Ye arrived with three guests, including white nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes.

Trump has since said he didn’t know Fuentes or his background when they dined together, a claim Fuentes confirmed in an interview, but others at the crowded members-only club figured out his identity.

In damage control, Trump’s campaign is now instituting new vetting procedures and gatekeeping efforts as details emerge about how Fuentes and the former president found themselves at the same table, according to two people briefed on the plans.

he headline-grabbing attention on his guests — and therefore the subsequent fallout — were all but ensured by Trump before the dinner when he made a grand entrance at about 8 p.m. on Nov. 22 to meet his guests.

“We saw everybody in the dining room get up and start applauding, and then the president entered,” Fuentes told NBC News. “He greeted us, and he invited Ye into dinner and Ye said that he wanted to bring us with him to the table. So we walked in and Ye took some pictures with some of the guests in the dining room and then we sat down at the table.”

Trump made sure they sat at his specially reserved table on the patio, for all to see, according to Fuentes.

But the dinner wasn’t the happy photo-op the president had planned.

Ye criticized Trump for not doing enough to help pay the legal bills of those arrested in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots; and he also told Trump he might run for president against him and said Trump should instead be his running mate — all of which angered the former president, who attacked Ye’s ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, according to two dinner participants and Ye, who blasted out a “Mar-a-Lago debrief” video to his 32.2 million Twitter followers the next day.

“Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes,” Ye said in the video.

Fuentes said that he praised Trump as “my hero” and criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for his potential GOP primary challenge to Trump, but he also told him to his face at the dinner that the onetime 2016 insurgent was in danger of becoming a scripted establishment bore who could lose in 2024.

One longtime Trump adviser, who didn’t want to go on the record criticizing his preferred candidate, said it was clear that Fuentes’ presence was part of a headline-grabbing setup.

“The master troll got trolled,” the adviser said. “Kanye punked Trump.”

As advisers to Trump have attempted to quell the backlash, some have insisted that the former president was essentially tricked by the rapper and his guests — a suspicion backed up by Milo Yiannopoulos, the anti-Trump, far-right provocateur who is now acting as a political adviser to Ye.

Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart editor who was banned from Twitter in 2016 for inciting a racist campaign against the comedian Leslie Jones, told NBC News that he was “the architect” of the plan to have Fuentes travel with Ye in the hopes of slipping him into the dinner with Trump. The intent, according to Yiannopoulos, was for Fuentes to give Trump an unvarnished view of how a portion of his base views his candidacy.

Yiannopoulos persuaded a former Trump 2016 campaign adviser from Florida, Karen Giorno, to give Ye a ride to Mar-a-Lago, which she said led her to become an accidental member of Ye’s dinner party. Yiannopoulos said he also wanted Giorno to brief Ye on Trump and politics and, if she went to the dinner, to lend a sense of political gravitas to the discussion. The fourth member of the party was a man Ye later identified as a parent of a student at his private school in California, Donda Academy. (Donda shut down for the year after Ye’s antisemitic remarks.) Yiannopoolos said he was unsure of why the man traveled with them.

Yiannopoulos said Fuentes is serving in an advisory capacity to Ye. Giorno is not an official member of the unofficial Ye campaign team but flew to Los Angeles to meet with them this week.

“I wanted to show Trump the kind of talent that he’s missing out on by allowing his terrible handlers to dictate who he can and can’t hang out with,” Yiannopoulos told NBC News.

“I also wanted to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most, the people who put him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end,” he added.

And, Yiannopoulos said, he arranged the dinner “just to make Trump’s life miserable” because news of the dinner would leak and Trump would mishandle it.

Fuentes echoed the sentiment: “I hate to say it, but the chickens are coming home to roost. You know, this is the frustration with his base and with his true loyalists.”

Trump fumed afterward that Ye had betrayed him by ambushing him. “He tried to f--- me. He’s crazy. He can’t beat me,” Trump said, according to one confidant, who then relayed the conversation to NBC News on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

“Trump was totally blindsided,” the source said of Fuentes’ presence. “It was a setup.”

Some in Trump’s orbit had cautioned him not to have dinner with Ye, under fire for antisemitism, in the first place, according to two sources who had been briefed on an internal damage assessment the campaign performed after the controversy erupted.

Trump issued three successive statements in as many days on his Truth Social media platform admitting Fuentes was there while disavowing knowledge of his identity prior to and during the dinner.

But none of his statements disavowed the hate speech associated with Fuentes, prompting more criticism that the former president is reluctant to distance himself too much from racists because they’re part of his political base of support.

“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 said in his last statement about the dinner, issued Saturday. “We also discussed, to a lesser extent, politics, where I told him he should definitely not run for President, ‘any voters you may have should vote for TRUMP.’ Anyway, we got along great, he expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on ‘Tucker Carlson.’ Why wouldn’t I agree to meet? Also, I didn’t know Nick Fuentes.”

Amid the backlash, however, the campaign began reviewing internal procedures to ensure someone like Fuentes never winds up with Trump again, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

U.S. Secret Service distanced itself from the incident and said in a statement Monday that, as “a private club,” Mar-a-Lago’s security is in charge of “who may have been allowed access to their facilities.”

On Monday, Ye, Yiannopoulos and Fuentes were scheduled to discuss how the dinner came together in a joint appearance on a conservative webcast, but the rapper stormed out after he was challenged about his statements suggesting Jewish people control banks and the news media.

His entourage followed.

Hours before Ye’s flight arrived in Florida, Yiannopoulos enticed Giorno to pick up the rapper in Miami and take him to Mar-a-Lago, 70 miles away. Giorno said that Yiannopoulos only told her that Ye would be with two people, including someone named “Nick,” but he didn’t give a last name. Yiannopoulos confirmed that he gave limited information to Giorno.

Both say Giorno was not told in advance of the plan to confront Trump.

But some Trump loyalists and advisers in Trump’s inner circle still fault Giorno for not giving the former president or his team a heads-up about Fuentes, whose identity she said she learned on the drive.

“Given Milo’s multiyear, anti-Trump posts since 2020 and his self-proclaimed desire to get a vengeance on President Donald Trump, Karen Giorno cannot in good faith say that she didn’t know what Milo was planning to do … Karen and Milo set Trump up to make him look bad,” said Laura Loomer, a Trump loyalist who ran for Congress in Florida in 2020 and hired Giorno, who then met and hired Yiannopoulos to work for Loomer.

Both had separate clashes with Giorno, in 2022 and 2020, respectively. Yiannopoulos and Giorno dismissed Loomer’s criticisms as the result of their falling out.

Giorno said she had been caught in the blast radius of the dinner with Ye and Fuentes but was an unwitting participant. On the night she drove the crew to Mar-a-Lago, she said, she didn’t realize there was going to be a confrontation and she didn’t have time to call or text anyone with a heads-up because Ye’s flight landed about 5 p.m., in the middle of the South Florida metropolis’ rush hour on a rainy day. It took the party three hours to get to Mar-a-Lago, double what it normally takes.

About halfway to Mar-a-Lago, Giorno said in an interview, she realized that Ye, Fuentes and the other man weren’t properly attired.

“All of you are wearing jeans. Did they not tell you about the dress code?” she said she asked.

Ye said he hadn’t been informed and that “I doubt Nick is going to get in anyway.”

“Nick,” she said she asked, “what’s your last name?”

Fuentes gave his last name.

“I’m going to kill Milo,” Giorno said she thought.

Giorno kept driving and said they would probably have trouble getting into Mar-a-Lago because of private security and Secret Service. Giorno said she also realized she had forgotten her driver’s license, so she had to use a credit card with her name on it to prove her identity to get in.

Because she had Ye in her car and she is a frequent visitor to the property, having attended Trump’s campaign announcement seven days before, Giorno said, the four of them were able to get in.

Trump met the party in the foyer and warmly greeted everyone, but he was puzzled that his old adviser was somehow with Ye, Giorno said. Giorno said she tried to leave Trump with Ye privately.

“Sir, it’s really good to see you again,” she said she told Trump. “My understanding is you’re supposed to have a private meeting with Ye and I’m happy to go to the bar with these two guys while you have dinner.”

But Trump deferred.

“I’ll leave that to Ye. Do you want them to join?” Trump asked, according to Giorno.

“Yes,” Ye replied. “Let’s all eat.”

“Great,” Trump said. “Let’s go out to the patio.


McConnell after Trump-Fuentes dinner: Anyone meeting with antisemites 'unlikely to ever be elected president'
Quote:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., appeared to take aim at former President Donald Trump on Tuesday over his decision to host Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes for dinner last week at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

Flanked by other top Republicans, the GOP's Senate leader opened his weekly news conference by saying: "First, let me just say that there is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy. And anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, are highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States."

McConnell didn't name Trump in his remarks and when pressed by reporters about whether he would support the former president if he wins the GOP nomination in 2024, McConnell didn't respond directly.

"There is simply no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy, and that would apply to all of the leaders in the party who will be seeking offices," he said.

After a meeting with congressional leaders and President Joe Biden at the White House on Tuesday morning, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., also weighed in on the dinner for the first time.

Asked about the meeting, McCarthy said: "I don't think anybody should be spending any time with Nick Fuentes. He has no place in this Republican Party. I think President Trump came out four times and condemned him and didn't know who he was."


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29 Nov 2022, 9:50 pm

Does this thread belong here? I've been trying to find where it mentions autism.



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30 Nov 2022, 4:41 am

renaeden wrote:
Does this thread belong here? I've been trying to find where it mentions autism.

You are right, I am going to get it moved.


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30 Nov 2022, 5:51 am

This whole things sounds hilarious.


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30 Nov 2022, 9:44 am

I believe Trump didn’t know who Fuentes was.

Ye pulled a fast one on him.

Still, it is hoped that Trump gets indicted for his crimes.