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"Kanye has trolled Trump." The inside story of the former president's explosive dinner with a supremacist leader

2022-11-30T13:52:14.741Z


What was supposed to be a private dinner turned out to be a political nightmare for Trump. By Marc Caputo - NBC News Just two days before Thanksgiving, Donald Trump was planning to have a private, no-fuss dinner with an old friend: Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. The two had met 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 cultural pariah for his anti-Semitic r


By Marc Caputo -

NBC News

Just two days before Thanksgiving, Donald Trump was planning to have a private, no-fuss dinner with an old friend: Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West.

The two had met 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 cultural pariah for his anti-Semitic remarks, according to people familiar with conversations between the two men.

But Trump may have fallen for a trap in the gilded halls of Mar-a-Lago because of his penchant for showmanship and being the center of attention.

He arrived with three guests, including white nationalist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes.

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Trump has since said he did not know Fuentes or his background when they dined together, a claim Fuentes confirmed in an interview, but his identity was picked up by others in the packed members' club.

News of the meeting sparked an avalanche of criticism from some Republican rivals and allies of Trump and the presidential campaign of him, who was then a week old. 

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To do damage control, the Trump campaign is instituting new investigative procedures and enforcement efforts as details emerge about how Fuentes and the former president sat down at the same table, according to two people briefed on the plans.

The uproar underscores the historic problems with Trump as Republicans consider whether they want him to be president again in 2024.

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Both his campaigns and his Administration have often been characterized by chaos and have been rocked by the consequences of his impulses as he stumbled from crisis to crisis.

And Trump has repeatedly placed himself at the center of polemics over racism, from falsely accusing the first black president of not being a natural-born citizen to announcing his 2016 presidential bid casting most Mexican migrants as rapists and drug dealers.

The troll master was trolled

The headline attention on his guests - and thus the subsequent repercussions - were all but assured by Trump before the dinner, when he made a grand entrance around 8 p.m. on November 22 to meet his guests. 

“We saw everyone in the dining room get up and start applauding, and then the president came in,” Fuentes told NBC News, Noticias Telemundo's sister network.

“He greeted us, and he invited Ye to dinner and Ye said that she wanted to take us to the table with him.

So we went in and Ye took some photos with some of the guests in the dining room and then we sat down at the table."

Trump made sure they were seated at his specially reserved table on the patio, in full view, according to sources.

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But the dinner was not the happy photo op the president had planned.

Ye criticized Trump for not doing enough to help pay the legal bills for those arrested in the Jan. 6 riot on Capitol Hill.

He also told him that he could run for president against him, but that he should be his running mate, angering the former president, who attacked Ye's ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, according to two dinner participants and Ye, who He posted a

Mar-a-Lago debrief

video the following day

to his 32.2 million Twitter followers. 

Former President Donald Trump meets with rapper Kanye West in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington DC, on October 11, 2018. The Washington Post / The Washington Post via Getty Im

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

Sources said he praised Trump as "my hero" and criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for his potential challenge to Trump in the GOP primary, but also told him to his face at dinner that the 2016 erstwhile insurgent he

was in danger of becoming a boring and predictable

establishment

player who could lose in 2024.

Some Republicans, including former Vice President Mike Pence, have condemned the dinner, and Pence has called on Trump to apologize. 

[Mike Pence believes there will be “better options” than Trump in 2024. “Voters are looking for new leadership,” he says]

A former Trump adviser, who has declined to go into criticism of his preferred candidate, said it was clear Fuentes' presence was part of a headline-grabbing stunt. 

“The master troll was trolled.

Kanye has trolled Trump," the adviser said.

While Trump aides have tried to quell backlash, some have insisted the former president was essentially set up by the rapper and his guests, a suspicion backed by Milo Yiannopoulos, the far-right, anti-Trump troublemaker who now acts as a political adviser. of Ye.

Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart editor who was banned from Twitter in 2016 for inciting a racist campaign against comedian Leslie Jones, told NBC News that he was "the architect" of the plan for Fuentes to travel with Ye in hopes of sneaking him into dinner with trump

The intention, according to Yiannopoulos, was for Fuentes to give Trump a no-nonsense view of how a part of his base views his candidacy.

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Yiannopoulos convinced a former Trump 2016 campaign adviser in Florida, Karen Giorno, to take Ye to Mar-a-Lago, which she said led to her becoming an accidental member of Ye's dinner party.

Yiannopoulos said she also wanted Giorno to brief Ye on Trump and politics and, if she went to the dinner, to give a sense of political gravity to the discussion.

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The fourth member of the party was a man Ye later identified as the father of a student at his private school in California, Donda Academy.

(Donda closed for a year after Ye's anti-Semitic comments.) Yiannopoolos said he wasn't sure why the man traveled with them.

Yiannopoulos said Fuentes is serving in an advisory capacity to Ye.

Giorno is not an official member of Ye's unofficial campaign team, but he flew to Los Angeles to meet with them this week.

"I wanted to show Trump the kind of talent he's missing out on by letting his terrible handlers dictate who he can and can't date," Yiannopoulos told NBC News. 

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

And, according to Yiannopoulos, he hosted the dinner "just to make life miserable for Trump," as word of the dinner would leak out and Trump would mishandle it. 

Fuentes echoed the sentiment: “I hate to say it, the bad things he's done in the past have come back to shake him up.

This is the frustration with his base and with his true loyalists.”

["I'd prefer someone else," Pence says of another Trump run for the White House]

Trump later fumed that Ye had betrayed him by ambushing him.

“He tried to fuck me.

He is crazy.

He can't beat me,” Trump claimed, according to an insider, who later relayed the conversation to NBC News on condition of anonymity.

“Trump was totally surprised,” the source said of Fuentes' presence.

“It was a trap,” he added.

He had been warned by some in Trump's orbit not to dine with Ye, questioned over his anti-Semitism in the first place, according to two sources briefed on an internal damage assessment the campaign conducted after the controversy erupted.

But Trump has been known for refusing to heed prudential advice, advisers and critics.

So he went ahead with dinner alone, telling his confidants that he thought Ye needed his advice.

A confidant told NBC that Trump acknowledged that he wanted the rapper to be seen because he "would be fun for the members" of Mar-a-Lago.

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Trump issued three successive statements in as many days on his Truth Social platform admitting Fuentes was there while denying his identity before and during the dinner.

But none of his remarks disavowed hate speech associated with Fuentes, prompting further criticism that the former president is reluctant to distance himself too far from racists because they are part of his political support base.

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"Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was seeking my advice regarding some of his difficulties, particularly 'related to his business," Trump explained in his latest statement about the dinner, issued Saturday.

“We also talked, to a lesser extent, about politics, where I told him that he definitely shouldn't be running for president, 'any voter you have should vote for TRUMP'… Anyway, we got along very well, he didn't express any anti-Semitism, and I appreciated all the nice things he said about me on 'Tucker Carlson'.

Why wouldn't he agree to meet?

Also, I didn't know Nick Fuentes."

However, amid the backlash, the campaign began reviewing internal procedures to ensure someone like Fuentes does not meet with Trump again, according to two sources familiar with the discussions. 

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The US Secret Service distanced itself from the incident, saying in a statement Monday that as "a private club," Mar-a-Lago's security is handled by "who may have had access to its facilities."

On Monday, Ye, Yiannopoulos and Fuentes were scheduled to discuss how the dinner came about in a joint appearance on a conservative

webcast

, but the rapper stormed out after being challenged for his remarks suggesting that Jews control the banks and the media. 

His entourage followed him.

Entering Mar-a-Lago

The pre-Thanksgiving dinner was the third shock to rock Trump's presidential campaign, which was exactly one week old on the night of the dinner.

Hours before the turkey and stuffing were to be served, the US Supreme Court ordered Trump to turn over his tax return forms to Congress, capping off a yearlong fight that followed Trump's 2014 declaration that he would “love” to publish them if he ran for president.

And four days before Ye's dinner, on November 18, the Justice Department appointed a special prosecutor to examine the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol and Trump's possession of highly sensitive government documents. at Mar-a-Lago when he was no longer president.

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Hours before Ye's flight was due to arrive in Florida, Yiannopoulos seduced Giorno into picking up the rapper in Miami and taking him to Mar-a-Lago, 70 miles (112 kilometers) away.

Giorno said Yiannopoulos only told him that Ye would be with two people, including someone named "Nick," but he did not give him his last name.

Yiannopoulos confirmed that he gave limited information to Giorno. 

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

But some Trump loyalists and advisers in Trump's inner circle continue to blame Giorno for failing to tip off the former president or his team about Fuentes, whose identity he said he learned on the way.

“Given Milo has been posting anti-Trump messages for several years since 2020 and his self-proclaimed desire to get revenge on Donald Trump, Karen Giorno cannot say in good faith that she did not know what Milo was planning to do (...) Karen and Milo they 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 later met and hired Yiannopoulos to work for Loomer.

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Both had separate run-ins with Giorno, in 2022 and 2020, respectively.

Yiannopoulos and Giorno dismissed Loomer's criticism as a result of their matchup. 

Loomer was one of the first high-profile right-wing activists to be banned from Twitter in 2018, after calling one of the country's first Muslim congresswomen, Democrat Ilhan Omar, from Minnesota, "anti-Jewish" and attacking Islam. for abusing women. 

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Loomer also criticized Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., for being complicit in Trump's alleged setup because she is an ally of Yiannopoulos and had hired him as a summer intern. 

A Greene spokesman denied the allegation of his involvement but declined to comment further to NBC News.

Greene responded to Loomer on his Telegram channel.

Greene also has a connection to Fuentes: He spoke at her America First Political Action conference in Florida in February, but later said he didn't know who he was.

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Giorno said she had been caught in the range of the dinner with Ye and Fuentes, but was an unwitting participant.

The night he drove the team to Mar-a-Lago he didn't realize there was going to be a confrontation and didn't have time to call or text to let anyone know because Ye's flight landed around 5 a.m. in the afternoon, during rush hour in the South Florida metropolis on a rainy day.

It took her three hours to get to Mar-a-Lago, twice as long as it normally takes.  

Halfway to Mar-a-Lago, Giorno noticed that Ye, Fuentes, and the other man were not dressed properly.

“You all wear jeans.

Were you not informed of the dress code?” she asked.

Ye said he had not been informed and "I doubt Nick is going to go in anyway."

"Nick," he asked, "what's your last name?"

Fuentes gave his last name.

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I'm going to kill Milo, he thought.

Giorno kept driving and said that they would probably have trouble getting into Mar-a-Lago because of private security and the Secret Service.

He also realized that he had forgotten his driver's license, so he had to use a credit card in his name to prove his identity to get in.

Because she had Ye in her car and is a frequent visitor to the property, having attended Trump's campaign announcement seven days earlier, the four of them were allowed inside.

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Trump met the party in the lobby and warmly greeted everyone, but was surprised that his former adviser was somehow with Ye.

Giorno said that he tried to leave Trump with Ye in private.

"Sir, I'm so glad to see you again," he told Trump.

“I understand that you are supposed to have a private meeting with Ye and I am happy to go to the bar with these two guys while you have dinner.”

But Trump refused.

“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 into the yard."


Source: telemundo

All news articles on 2022-11-30

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