House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) chastised former President Donald Trump on Tuesday for dining with white nationalist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.
McCarthy said the 24-year-old far-right influencer’s views, which include Holocaust denial, have no place in the Republican Party. Trump insists he didn’t know who Fuentes was and that the meeting was mainly between himself and rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, who is in hot water as well for antisemitic tweets.
TRUMP CALLS KANYE WEST ‘SERIOUSLY TROUBLED MAN’ AFTER FALLOUT FROM MAR-A-LAGO DINNER
“I don’t think anybody should be spending any time with Nick Fuentes. He has no place in this Republican Party,” McCarthy told reporters outside the White House ahead of a meeting with President Joe Biden.
“I think President Trump came out four times and condemned him but didn’t know who he was,” he continued. A reporter clarified that the former president had not condemned Fuentes at all.
McCarthy added that he condemns Fuentes’s ideology and said the former president should not have met with Ye either.
“I don’t think those are right comments, and I don’t think he should have associated with him as well,” he said.
The Republican leader also briefly addressed his hopes for a continuing budget resolution to keep the government funded after Dec. 16 when the current stopgap measure runs out, saying he would support a “commonsense CR and fix this come January.” Democrats are hoping for a resolution that would fund the government well into next year.
Trump has defended his dinner with Ye and Fuentes, which took place one week after Trump announced his bid for president in 2024, as “quick and uneventful.”
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“We got along great, [West] expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on ‘Tucker Carlson,'” Trump said in a statement on Truth Social. “Why wouldn’t I agree to meet? Also, I didn’t know Nick Fuentes.”
Other Republican lawmakers have condemned the meeting, with Sen. John Thune (R-SD) saying it was “just a bad idea on every level. I don’t know who was advising him on his staff, but I hope that whoever that person was got fired.”
