President Joe Biden on Saturday declined to comment on Donald Trump’s impromptu dinner with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and disgraced rapper Kanye West in Mar-a-Lago.
“They don’t want to know what I’m thinking,” he replied to ‘s question while out shopping in Nantucket with wife Jill and daughter Ashley.
Biden, who is spending the Thanksgiving holiday on the island, was out on Small Business Saturday. He visited at least nine stores in the more than an hour he spent walking through the downtown shopping district.
Trump caused outrage – even among some Republicans – when it was revealed he had dinner at his Palm Beach home with Fuentes, who has been described as an alt-right figure and “white supremacist.” Ye, as the rapper West now says, was there too.
The White House has previously commented on the matter, with spokesman Andrew Bates saying: “Bigotery, hatred and anti-Semitism have absolutely no place in America – including Mar-A-Lago.” Holocaust denial is repulsive and dangerous and must be strongly condemned.’
President Joe Biden declined to comment on Donald Trump’s impromptu dinner with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and disgraced rapper Kayne West — over Biden shopping with First Lady Jill Biden in Nantucket on Saturday
Former President Donald Trump and Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, dined with Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago earlier this week
Nick Fuentes is a white supremacist and Holocaust denier
Trump confirmed the dinner on Friday in a post on Truth Social but said Fuentes was a guest of West. He did not condemn Fuentes’ faith.
“Last week Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly after, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends I didn’t know about. We had dinner on the back patio on Tuesday night with many members present. Dinner was quick and uneventful. Then they went to the airport.”
The former president also said he “doesn’t know” Fuentes and has given both business and political advice to the West.
“I told him under no circumstances should he run for president, ‘all the voters you might have should vote for TRUMP,'” the former president wrote on Truth Social. “Anyway, we got on great, he didn’t express any anti-Semitism and I appreciated all the nice things he said about me in ‘Tucker Carlson.'”
West has come under fire for his recent anti-Semitic remarks, which has led to companies like Adidas developing close ties with him.
On Friday, Ye said in a video posted to Twitter that Trump was “impressed” with Fuentes.
“So Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes, and unlike so many lawyers and so many people who have stuck with him on his 2020 campaign, Nick Fuentes is actually a loyalist,” Ye said.
Fuentes is the subject of much controversy.
In an episode of his podcast, Fuentes said “jokingly” denied the Holocaust and compared Jews being burned in Nazi concentration camps to biscuits in an oven.
He has been banned from most major social media platforms for his white nationalist rhetoric.
He was on the US Capitol grounds on the day of the riot on January 6, 2021; at the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017; and supported Trump’s false claim that he won the 2020 election instead of Biden.
He runs a white nationalist youth organization called America First.
At dinner with Fuentes and Ye Tuesday night, Trump was impressed by Fuente’s ability to “rattle off stats and recall speeches from his 2016 campaign” — but had no idea about his controversial background, sources told Axios.
But some Republicans have slammed Trump for his choice of dinner.
David M. Friedman, an Orthodox Jew who served as Trump’s ambassador to Israel during his presidency, publicly criticized the former president for hosting the duo and tweeted that Trump was “better than that.”
“To my friend Donald Trump, you are better than this,” he tweeted on Friday.
“Even a social visit from an anti-Semite like Kanye West and human scum like Nick Fuentes is unacceptable. I challenge you to throw out these bums, deny them and relegate them to the dustbin of history where they belong.’
Chris Christie, a former New Jersey GOP governor, also weighed in.
“This is just another example of a terrible lack of judgment on the part of Donald Trump, which combined with his previous poor judgments, makes him an untenable candidate for the 2024 Republican Party general election,” he said.
NBC News has since reported that those close to Trump have been reeling from the aftermath of the meeting, although the former president reportedly had no prior knowledge of who Fuentes was.
“This is a bloody nightmare,” said a longtime Trump adviser, speaking anonymously.
Kanye West has revealed that Donald Trump has turned down his bid to run under him in the upcoming 2024 election, less than a week after the rapper announced plans to run for president
Former President Donald Trump said Friday that disgraced rapper Kanye West showed up “unexpectedly” at Mar-a-Lago and said he knew “nothing about” his group — including a prominent white nationalist
In a post on Truth Social Friday, Trump said he welcomed Ye to Mar-a-Lago for talks on business
Trump announced earlier this month that he would run for president in 2024.
Ye heavily commented on the dinner on his social media account, where he also claimed he asked Trump to be his vice president when he runs for president in 2024.
“The thing Trump was most concerned about [is] I asked him to be my vice president,” Kanye said in the clip, which was posted to his Twitter account on Thanksgiving night.
He continued, “I think that was further down the list of things that caught him off guard. It was the fact that I came in with intelligence.’
He further accused the ex-head of state of resisting culture by firing moody members of his cabinet like top aides Karen Giorno and Steve Bannon, while distancing himself from other public figures like Fuentes because of their views.
West would continue to hail Fuentes as a Trump loyalist, campaigning for his support of the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol by citizens loyal to the then-outgoing president.
‘Nick Fuentes, unlike so many lawyers and some people [Trump] left over from his 2020 campaign, he’s actually a loyalist,” West said in the video, which included a caption with the hashtag #YE24.