According to a recent report, Donald Trump‘s political damage from meeting with one of America‘s most notorious racists worsened because he refused to follow his aides’ advice and reject the man’s ideas.
In the hours and days following his meeting with Kanye West, Mr. Trump’s aides urged him to criticise Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and antisemite hated by the left and far-right for his racist and anti-Jewish sentiments.
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Mr. Fuentes and Mr. West’s campaign manager, ex-Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos, who was banned from Twitter for racist rants against comic Leslie Jones, met with the former president at Mar-a-Lago.
Even though his closest advisers told him to stay away from Mr. Fuentes, Mr. Trump just said that the former president didn’t know who he was before they met.
Trump posted on Truth Social that Kanye West wants to visit Mar-a-Lago. “Our dinner meeting was supposed to be Kanye and myself, but he came with a visitor I had never met and knew nothing about.”
It’s just the latest example of Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to forcefully rebuke and reject his most fringe supporters on the racist far right, the most famous being in the days after the Charlottesville riot, where neo-Nazis and other avowed racists clashed with counterprotesters and one woman was killed when a Nazi rammed his vehicle into a crowd of pedestrians.
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Trump eventually blamed both sides for the violence and murder.
Mr. West, who sought the former president to be his running mate, claimed Mr. Trump informed him his 2024 presidential candidacy was a mistake during the meeting.